Drama as ‘Obidients’ close alternative result collation portal after Tinubu’s lead

Controversy has trailed an independent collation of the February 25 presidential election results spearheaded by supporters of the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi.

o prove their candidate’s case, supporters of Obi, known better as ‘Obidients’ on social media, had mobilised themselves to independently collate results and show Nigerians that the former Anambra State governor won the presidential poll.

The supporters, spearheaded by one Mark Essien, with the username @markessien on the popular microblogging site, Twitter, had claimed that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System and Election Result Viewing Portal deployed by INEC were not utilised and true election results from different polling units across the country were not what was uploaded on the portal.

Collating results on an independent iReV, with the help of other Obidients, the first set of results shared by Essien showed that Obi was in the clear lead, a development that further justified the claim that their candidate was allegedly rigged out.

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“The way things are going, by tomorrow, we would have counted 160,000 polling unit results and done our own collation. All collation officers that thought they could announce anything they wanted did not understand the power of a mass movement,” Essien had tweeted on Thursday.

Trouble however started hours later after the collation showed that Tinubu polled more votes than Obi and Atiku combined and was in the lead against expectation. With the development, some Obidents turned on Essien and accused him of allegedly working for the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, and not for Obi’s cause.

Leading the attack on Essien, a Twitter user with the handle @AfamDeluxo wrote, “Mark Essien is deeply into Nasiru El-rufai’s pocket. Trust whatever you think he is doing for the obidient movement at your own peril. You can go ahead and trust him, that’s fine, I don’t anyone that is friends, or crony with the high and mighty in the APC. Especially someone like Nasiru El-rufai. Never!”

Source: Legit.ng