Court Jails UNICAL Professor For Manipulating 2019 Election Results For APC

A court has jailed UNICAL Professor for manipulating 2019 election results for APC.

NewsOne Nigeria reports that a High Court sitting in Akwa Ibom state, southern Nigeria, has sentenced a professor of soil science at the University of Calabar (UNICAL), Peter Ogban, to three years in prison for manipulating election results.

Ogban, who was the returning officer in the senatorial election in Akwa Ibom north-west in 2019, was also fined N100,000 fine.

The UNICAL Professor was prosecuted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

This online news platform understands that the court found the UNICAL Professor guilty of altering results of the election to favour the All Progressives Congress (APC), Nigeria’s ruling political party, against the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Nigeria’s main opposition political party.

In January, the UNICAL Professor told the court he did not rig the election but only collated the results as given to him by the LGA area returning officers.

The UNICAL Professor was first arraigned in November 2020 after being accused of rigging the election in favour of Godswill Akpabio, then-APC candidate.

INEC had said in a statement issued then: “He changed the outcome of the election by reducing the score of a leading candidate by a huge five thousand (5,000) votes and increasing the losing candidate’s score by the same margin without altering the overall total valid votes cast to avoid detection.

“Unfortunately for him, there is no perfect crime as the early information trigger tracking system of the Electoral Operation Support Centre (EOSC), fully activated throughout the period of the election exposed him.”

Meanwhile, NewsOne Nigeria reports that INEC is also prosecuting another professor, Ignatius Uduk, who worked in the election, for alleged unlawful generation of results.

The Commission said Uduk from the University of Uyo “declared election results collated not by him, but by undisclosed individuals who only handed them to him to announce.”