Claims The spokesman of the Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign Organisation, Senator Dino Melaye recently claimed that the Labour Party could only field 30 of 109 candidates for the Senate in the 2023 general elections and that the party could not field the seats for the House of Reps in every constituency. He claimed further that
Claims
The spokesman of the Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign Organisation, Senator Dino Melaye recently claimed that the Labour Party could only field 30 of 109 candidates for the Senate in the 2023 general elections and that the party could not field the seats for the House of Reps in every constituency. He claimed further that the Labour Party could not field up to 50 per cent for the Houses of Assembly seats.
Verdict
Full Story
The spokesman of the Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign Organisation, Senator Dino Melaye in a recent interview on Saturday, November 6, 2022, made the above claims when he spoke with newsmen in Abuja.
The claims have been published by Vanguard, ThisDay and some other news media here and here
In the report, Senator Dino Melaye said whoever voted for Peter Obi in the coming election would only be voting for Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, as Obi’s votes were only going to deplete Atiku’s votes in the South-South and the South-East geo-political zones which are regarded as the strongholds of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) on which platform Atiku Abubakar is running for the presidential election.
In his words, Senator Dino Melaye said:
“The truth of the matter is that the Labour Party only fielded 30 out of 109 candidates for the Senate”.
“ They only fielded in 30 Constituencies.
“Even the House of Reps, they couldn’t field in every constituency.
“For the House of Assembly, they couldn’t field up to 50 per cent of the seats across the Constituencies”
Verification
- Claim 1: That Labour Party fielded only 30 of 109 candidates for Senate
We took steps to verify the veracity of this claim by visiting the INEC’s website and examined the document on “23:ELECTION FINAL LIST OF CANDIDATES FOR NATIONAL ELECTIONS. This list contains party nominations for Presidential, Senatorial and House of Representatives seats for all parties across the 36 states of the federation.
Since the INEC list of candidates were collated and published state by state across all the political parties, we resorted to manual counting of the list of senatorial candidates fielded by the Labour Party and came to a conclusion.
Our findings show that Labour Party has fielded 80 candidates out of the 109 seats in the Senate, contrary to Senator Dino Melaye’s assertion.
Claim 2: That Labour Party could not field candidates in all constituencies for the House of Reps
Evidence shows that the Labour Party could not truly field candidates for House of Representatives in all constituencies across the country. According to INEC’s list, Labour Party did not field any candidates for the House of Representatives in Borno, Ekiti, Katsina, Kebbi, Lagos, Ondo and Yobe. . This statement is therefore true.
- Claim 3: That Labour Party couldn’t field up to 50 per cent of the seats across the country for the Houses of Assembly election.
According to INEC’s ” FINAL LIST OF CANDIDATES FOR STATE ELECTION” which contains all the lists for the Governorship & Houses of Assembly seats, Labour Party actually fielded 769 Candidates out of 993 States of Assembly seats across the Country.
This simply translates to 77.4% of all the Houses of Assembly seats contrary to less than 50% as claimed by Dino Melaye. This statement is, therefore, false.
Conclusion
Only one out the three claims made by Senator Dino Melaye was correct. Labour Party has fielded 80 candidates for the senatorial election and not 30. He is correct to say the Labour Party could not field candidates for the House of Representatives in all the constituencies. He is incorrect to have said Labour couldn’t field up to 50 per cent of the seats across for the Houses of Assembly because Labour Party has fielded candidates for that election in 77.4% of the total number of constituencies.
