Barrister Hudu Yunusa Ari, the embattled Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Adamawa State who was suspended, has refuted the widely-repeated claim that he accepted N2 billion in exchange for declaring Senator Aishatu Dahiru Binani the victor of the governorship election in Adamawa State.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) had Senator Aisha Binani as the Adamawa governorship candidate in the 2023 election.
She had run against the incumbent governor of the state, Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri, who was the PDP candidate and later recognised as the election’s victor by INEC.
On Tuesday, Hudu stated that he had absolutely no regrets about the decision he had made to make the declaration during that election.
The lawyer who the police were seeking, Barrister Hudu Yunusa, said that it was his duty to announce the outcome because it was required by law.
“I utterly swear that I had no connection to either Binani or Fintiri. Social media buzz created all of these rumours regarding the N2 billion bribe.
“I have no regrets at all; there are none when you do something that was permitted to be done in a democracy,” he remarked.
The Binani Story
Aishatu Binani is a Nigerian politician who has been serving as the senator for Adamawa Central since 2019.
She was born in 1971. She started her early school education in Kaduna and completed it at Gwadabawa Primary School, Jimeta Yola. She went to the UK for her university education, where she obtained a Higher National Diploma in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southampton. She is currently the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She was declared the winner of the APC Adamawa governorship primary after polling 430 votes to defeat her closest contestant, Nuhu Ribadu, the pioneer Executive Chairman of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), who got 288 votes.
In 2021, an appeal court sitting in Yola declared Aishatu Binani the governorship candidate of the All Progressive Congress (APC) in Adamawa.
