It’s Official: Tambuwal wins re-election as Sokoto State Governor

The Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has been re-elected for a second term.

Mr Tambuwal defeated the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Ahmad Aliyu, to emerge the winner in a hotly contested exercise,

The margin of victory was only 342 votes, according to the electoral commission, INEC.

The INEC Returning Officer, Fatima Mukhtar, formally declared Mr Tambuwal winner on Sunday afternoon. She said he scored the highest number of votes after the summation of results from both the March 9 first ballot and Saturday’s supplementary election in Sokoto State.

In the supplementary election, Mr Tambuwal polled 24,444 votes. He scored 489,558 votes in the inconclusive first ballot, bringing his total to 512,002.

His main opponent, Mr Aliyu of the APC, polled a total of 511,660 votes, being the sum of 486,145 and 25,515 in the first ballot and supplementary election, respectively.

Mr Tambuwal narrowly defeated his former deputy with 342 votes, helped by the lead he had established in the first ballot of March 9.

A total of 31,662 votes were rejected, while 1,036,332 votes were recorded as valid, bringing total votes cast to 1,067,994.

Sokoto has 1,887,767 registered voters, 56.5 per cent of whom turned out for the governorship election as the number of total votes cast shows.

“Aminu Waziri Tambuwal…is hereby declared winner and is returned elected,” Ms Mukhtar declared at 01:46 p.m. on Sunday, throwing the collation centre into jubilation.

Shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar (God is great)’ and ‘Sai Mutawalle’ covered the collation centre after the declaration.

Mr Tambuwal, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, is a trained lawyer.

He was first elected governor on the platform of the APC in 2015. He, however, defected to the PDP in 2018 to pursue the party’s presidential ticket which he lost to former vice president Atiku Abubakar.

He, then, swiftly, returned to Sokoto to pick the PDP governorship ticket to run for a second term.

Mr Tambuwal’s biggest challenge came from his predecessor, Aliyu Wammako, who led the APC campaign for Mr Aliyu.

Mr Aliyu was Mr Tambuwal’s deputy governor but refused to defect to the PDP like his principal.