PDP REACTS ON KOGI ELECTIONS

Declare Wada Winner, PDP Tells INEC, Says APC Has Legally “Crashed” Out Of Kogi Election

The national leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has called on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to declare Governor Idris Wada of the PDP as winner of the November 21 inconclusive governorship election in Kogi State.

The opposition party made this position known in a communique issued at the end of its emergency national caucus meeting on Wednesday in Abuja.

The communique, read by the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Chief Olisa Metuh, among others, demanded the exclusion of the All Progressives Congress (APC) from the supplementary election slated for December 5.

The INEC had declared the polls inconclusive following the cancellation of elections in 91 units across 18 local government areas in the state.

However, a constitutional logjam ensued with the death of the APC candidate, Prince Abubakar Audu on the day the polls was declared inconclusive by INEC.

The late Audu, according to the results collated and declared so far, had won in 16 out of the 21 local government areas in the state and was leading the PDP candidate with over 41,000 votes.

But the PDP insisted that the APC’s candidate death during the election means the party has legally “crashed out” of the race even as it rejected the decision of INEC to yield to what it termed the “unlawful prompting of a clearly partisan Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Mallam Abubakar Malami”, to allow APC substitute its flag bearer in the middle of an election, even when such is alien to the Constitution and the Electoral Act.

The PDP noted that the substitution of a candidate by the APC means the party would have fielded two separate candidates in the same election, a scenario it argued is not only strange to Nigeria’s electoral laws, but also any known democratic norms and practice world-over.

Accusing the APC of orchestrating confusion in the polity with a view to diverting attention from its glaring incompetence and failure of governance, Metuh said the governing party knew it had no case even as he declared the PDP’s lack of confidence in the leadership of INEC under Prof. Mahmood Yakubu.

According to the PDP, the INEC under Yakubu has demonstrated that it is incapable of non-partisanship and and as such cannot be vested with the conduct of the Kogi governorship supplementary election as well as the December 5 Bayelsa governorship election.

“As a result, caucus demands the immediate resignation of the chairman and all national commissioners of INEC to pave the way for a new non-partisan commission to conduct the forthcoming elections.

“Caucus also demands the immediate resignation of the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Mallam Abubakar Malami for deliberately misleading INEC into arriving at the unconstitutional decision of allowing APC to substitute its candidate in the inconclusive election”, the communique read.

The PDP further stated that in order to save the nation’s democracy from imminent collapse, it would, as a critical stakeholder, immediately challenge INEC’s unlawful and unconstitutional decision in the court.

It also raised the alarm that the AGF, INEC and APC are creating a scenario where a loser in a primary will bid his time for the winning candidate to finish election and then have him either poisoned or assassinated before the final collation of results.

The party, therefore, called on the international community to prevail on the APC-led federal government to stop this ceaseless assault on our democracy.