•Ufere Campaign demands fresh election, faults Duke’s victory
By Clifford Ndujihe & Omeiza Ajayi

FEW days after joining the Peoples Redemption Party, PRP, former Cross River State Governor, Mr. Donald Duke, yesterday, won the party’s presidential ticket and was declared presidential flag bearer for the 2027 general elections.

The party’s National Chairman, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, who made the announcement at the PRP national secretariat in Abuja, said Duke secured the presidential ticket after scoring the highest votes at the primary election.

Baba-Ahmed stated that Duke swept the polls with 6,499 votes, with his closest rival, Kingsley Yakubu, who mounted a nationwide campaign focusing on youth inclusion and economic reform, scoring 2,699 votes. He said that Dr Nnaoke Ufere, an academic and policy expert, got third place with 784 votes.

While declaring the official results, Baba-Ahmed said that the exercise was free, credible and devoid of any form of bias.

He, however, said that any contestant who felt aggrieved with the electoral process should seek redress before the party’s Appeal Committee.

Ufere Campaign demands fresh election

Indeed, the presidential campaign organization of Ufere, has rejected the outcome of the primaries, presenting arithmetic evidence it says proves the declared results were manipulated in favour of Duke.

In a statement by Ishaq Alhassan, Executive Director of the Ufere2027 Presidential Campaign, the organization accused officials of inflating votes beyond the ceiling set by the official membership register submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, on May 4, 2026.

The campaign presented state-by-state figures it said made the manipulation impossible to deny. In Gombe, a register of 348 members produced 1,431 declared votes, a 311 per cent inflation, with over 1,000 ballots the campaign described as “phantom.” In Bauchi, 593 registered members produced 760 votes, an excess of 167. In Kwara, 55 members produced 82 votes. Across the three states alone, 996 registered members produced 2,273 votes — meaning 1,277 ballots, more than half the total declared vote, corresponded to no eligible voter on the party’s own INEC-approved list.

“A register is a ceiling. Turnout cannot exceed 100 per cent of the people allowed to vote. Every vote beyond the register is, by definition, a vote that should never have been counted,” the statement read.
The campaign noted that the phantom votes broke “overwhelmingly, in state after state,” in favour of Duke, who it said joined the PRP only days before the primary after defecting from another platform, did not campaign publicly at any point during the contest, and was reportedly outside the country while the election was being conducted.

By contrast, the statement said Ufere actively campaigned in all 36 states and the FCT, sponsored voter registration and member engagement efforts nationwide, funded a women’s mobilisation programme, and provided logistics support to enable grassroots members to attend events.

“A candidate who made that level of visible investment in party mobilization being defeated by a candidate who neither campaigned nor participated openly in the process raises serious questions that demand credible answers,” it said.

The campaign also alleged that party insiders had described the outcome as deliberately engineered, and pointing to reported plans for Duke to run alongside Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed, younger brother of PRP National Chairman, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed.

The campaign further rejected what it described as a post-primary attempt to substitute the governing membership register with a new list dated May 25, 2026, containing 12,378 members, compared with 7,787 on the INEC-approved May 4 register. The difference of 4,591 members represented a 59 per cent increase after the official rules had already been set.

“It cannot be changed after polling simply because the declared figures expose what they expose. Any attempt to retroactively swap the register is not a correction. It is a second irregularity layered on the first,” the statement said.

The Ufere2027 Campaign consequently demanded the immediate suspension of collation and any declaration of a presidential nominee; a full forensic audit of every vote measured against the May 4 INEC-approved register; publication of complete state-by-state and LGA-by-LGA accreditation and voting figures; nullification of all results in which votes exceeded the eligible register; an independent investigation into the concentration of excess votes in Duke’s favour; and the conduct of a fresh presidential primary in full compliance with party rules.

It also called for full accountability for persons responsible for the administrative failure, missing funds, reported violence and vote manipulation, and demanded an immediate investigation into the reported armed intimidation at the FCT polling location.

“The Peoples Redemption Party was built on a tradition of principled, accountable politics. That tradition is not honoured by a primary in which the votes outnumber the voters. The numbers are public now. They can be explained, or they can be answered for. They cannot be wished away,” the campaign organization declared.

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