Fintiri polled a total of 376,552 votes to beat Jibrilla Bindow, incumbent
Governor and candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who secured
336,386 votes, amounting to a margin of 40,166.
Before Thursday’s supplementary election, Fintiri had polled 367,471 votes
while Bindow had 334,995, leaving a margin of 32,476 votes and placing him
in a quite comfortable situation, as only 40,988 votes were cancelled by
the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
Bindow might have harboured faint hopes of catching up with his adversary,
but it was Fintiri who went even better, further widening the gap after
polling 9,081 votes at the supplementary exercise to Bidow’s 1,391.
Governor-elect Fintiri is a former Adamawa State Governor whose reign
remains one of the most short-lived ever in Nigeria’s history.
He was Speaker of the Adamawa State House of Assembly in July 2014 when
Murtala Nyako was impeached as Governor. With his deputy, Bala Ngilari,
having supposedly resigned just before the impeachment, Fintiri became
Acting Governor for the three months within which the law mandated the
conduct of a by-election.
He was the favourite to win the resultant by-election. However, three days
before the election, a Federal High Court sitting in Abuja invalidated
Ngilari’s supposed resignation, saying it didn’t follow the appropriate
channel as it wasn’t Nyako who accepted it. Consequently, it forbade the
conduct of the election and ordered the swearing in of Ngilari as
Governor.
In a twist of fate, when Fintiri secured the PDP ticket in last year’s
primary, he polled 1,656 votes to beat Abubakar Waziri, former Chief
Protocol Officer to former president Goodluck Jonathan, who polled 465
votes, as well as Ngilari, who could only muster 76 votes.