Nigerian police have arrested a deputy state governor for allegedly ordering the destruction of ballot boxes during the weekend’s parliamentary elections, officers said on Monday.
Adeleke Adewoyin is accused of intervening as his Alliance for Democracy (AD) lost six of the nine lower house seats in Osun State, in southwestern Nigeria, during Saturday’s poll, said police spokesperson Joshua Olayemi.
Osun was considered AD home territory until the election, but with seven of the state’s nine seats in the federal House of Representatives declared, it is clearly swinging towards President Olusegun Obasanjo’s party.
Olayemi said Adewoyin was being ”interviewed” in the Nigerian capital Abuja on an allegation that he ordered ballot boxes to be smashed in his hometown, Ile-Ife, where he had gone to monitor the poll.
The deputy governor was also alleged to have ordered the beating of a policeman at the polling centre, the spokesperson said.
”He will assist the police in their investigation into the allegation. As soon as Abuja clears him, he will be released along with six members of his entourage taken away along with him,” he said.
As a deputy governor, Adewoyin enoys constitutional immunity from prosecution. Both he and Osun’s governor Bisi Akande face a tough re-election battle on Saturday.
A close aide of the deputy governor, Adelani Baderinwa,
confirmed Adewoyin had been detained.
According to Baderinwa, Adewoyin, acting on a tip-off, found a polling centre in Ile-Ife where rigging was taking place and ordered it stopped.
But officials refused, and in the melee that ensued, some ballot boxes were broken, Baderinwa said by telephone from Osun’s capital, Osogbo, denying that his boss had ordered them smashed. – Sapa-AFP