Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) on Sunday chose Umaru Yar’Adua, Governor of the northern Katsina state, as its candidate for the April 2007 presidential election.
Yar’Adua (55) won hands down, garnering 3 024 votes out of a total of 4 007 valid votes cast, according to an Agence France-Presse journalist attending the PDP convention in the federal capital, Abuja.
Rochas Okorocha, a former special adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo and an ethnic Igbo from the east of the country, came second with just 372 votes and Aliyu Muhammed Gusau, a retired general who spent his career in intelligence, came third with 271 votes.
Ninety-four votes were disqualified.
Yar’Adua’s victory had been widely expected after the governors of PDP-controlled states on Friday chose him as their ”consensus candidate” and urged all party delegates to vote for him on the grounds that he ”presented the best credentials” and was ”generally acceptable across the country”.
Nigerians will go to the polls in April to choose a successor to Obasanjo, whose second four-year term is coming to an end and who is constitutionally barred from standing again. — Sapa-AFP