Olusola Fabiyi, Abuja
The Peoples Democratic Party has accused President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress of posting what it called fictitious figures as votes secured by the President at the APC Presidential primary.
It said the plan behind the huge figure was to hoodwink Nigerians and create an impression of massive support for President Buhari ahead of the 2019 presidential election.
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The PDP said the alleged resort to the allocation of figures had shown that Buhari and the APC had lost hope of winning genuine votes in the 2019 general elections and want to rely on the allocation of fake votes to attempt to rig the main election.
The National Publicity Secretary of the PDP, Mr Kola Ologbondiyan, claimed in a statement on Sunday, that the Presidency forced the direct primary on the APC because of its determination to conjure figures ahead of the general elections.
He said, “Nigerians will recall that the PDP had alerted of intelligence reports that the Presidency forced a direct presidential primary on the APC so as to ‘eliminate delegates accreditation and pave the way for the allocation of millions of conjured votes, which they intend to use as a basis to authenticate the fictitious votes they intend to declare for President Buhari at the general elections.’
“The PDP had also alerted of how ‘very senior officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission including a blood relation of the President, who is in charge of the commission’s data centre, masterminded and pushed the plot.
“It is, therefore, ludicrous that 29 days after our statement, the Presidency and the APC staged a circus show in their party’s state secretariats, in the name of Presidential primary and came up with fictitious figures as votes secured by President Buhari.
“Nigerians were thoroughly amused as they see through the lies in APC’s allocation of fictitious 2.9 million votes in Kano, 1.9 million in Lagos, 802,819 in Katsina, in addition to other conjured figures in other states.”
Ologbondiyan added that what the APC and the Presidency failed to note was that Nigerians were already aware that no ballot allegedly took place and that such figures could not be tallied through mere voice vote involving few members of a derelict and disorganised party.
According to him, what counts in a general election is the participation of registered voters with Permanent Voter Cards and not fictitious figures from a padded party register or party members, many of who do not exist or hold PVCs.
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Moreover, he said that the APC did not have the number of members it was posting as having participated in the “circus”.
“We want the APC and INEC to know that our party is already privy to the polling centres in certain states which they are planning to use to allocate fake votes for President Buhari in the 2019 general elections and that we have also devised legitimate strategies of exposing and dismantling such plans ahead of the elections, just as the PDP did in Osun State,” he added.
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