Election of new officials to manage the affairs of the Oyo State Council of Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) for the next three years in Oyo State was on Wednesday marred with irregularities.

The election which took place at the Press Centre, Iyaganku, Ibadan, the secretariatof the union, indicated that the triennial exercise would be botched emerged early in the day with the complaints about the bogus list of participating journalists in the election unattended to by the representative of the National Secretariat of the union, Gbemiga Bamidele who had come from Abuja to supervise the election.

Only the position of the state chairman was contested for by the incumbent chairman, Gbenga Opadotun of the Nigerian Tribune and Wumi Faniran of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) Chapels.

Some concerned members had raised eyebrow at the 571 list of journalists presented as voters for the election considered as outrageous and unrealistic and called for reduction by removing the names of some spurious chapels never known to the council ahead of the election but which were inserted.

Bamidele, the national officer in attendance however insisted that there was nothing anybody could do about the list as sent from Abuja. At the end of the election, described as 'kangaroo' by some of the aggrieved members, Opadotun was declared as the winner with 375 votes as against 133 credited to Faniran.

In his reaction, Faniran described the election as a sham and a rape of democracy as he recalled that all the observations raised before the commencement of the voting that could have given it a tinge of credibility were ignored. While thanking his supporters for keeping faith with him, he said, “I want to tell you people that we have not lost anything as individuals, but our union has and we can only pray to God to deliver the union from its multifaceted problems among which are insincerity, maladministration, desperation, injustice and lack of fair-play”.

Ahead of the election, both the offices of the Vice-Chairman, Secretary and

Treasurer had been won unopposed by Olusegun Adeyemo of unspecified chapel, Rotimi Babalola and Dayo Owolabi of both Ministry of Information and Orientation and Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State (BCOS) chapels respectively.