TheCable

Abdul-Azeez Adediran, a politician and founder of CORE Media Group, says the nationwide membership registration exercise of the All Progressives Congress (APC) will address cases of intra-party rigging. 

The ruling party had, in 2020, announced that it would embark on nationwide membership registration. It, however, postponed the exercise, which was originally billed to commence in December, till the second week of January 2021.

Addressing journalists at a briefing on Thursday, Adediran said such initiative would foster transparency within the party, especially during elections, and end the era of imposing political candidates.

He explained that the absence of such arrangement during previous elections made it difficult to track the irregularities in the process of producing the party’s candidates.

Adeniran, who is the founder of Lagos4Lagos, a political movement established ahead of the 2023 general election, alleged that the extant APC membership register in Lagos is “manipulated”, with most of them reportedly containing “fictitious names.”

Buttressing his point, the 42-year-old politician cited the lack of uniformity in the votes polled by APC’s presidential and governorship candidates during the 2019 primaries in Lagos, and the eventual outcome of the general election.

“Most of the party membership registers you see in Lagos are manipulated. What you have on most of the registers are fictitious names that will enable them to impose any candidate of their choice. And you dare not challenge them because they hold the ace. For instance, how do you explain what happened in Lagos in the 2019 general election?” he queried.

“During the primaries, our presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, scored 1.9 million votes and our gubernatorial candidate, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, scored 970,000 votes. If you add it with governor Akinwumi Ambode’s 72,000, it’s over one million votes.

“But during the election, governor Sanwo-Olu who scored 970,000 during the primary managed to get 739,445 votes. Where are the leftovers of the over one million votes put together during the primary?

“What did President Buhari score? It’s a far cry from the 1.9 million votes we declared for him during the primary. Are we now saying that our party members didn’t vote for us? And here we are talking of a general election that involves everyone.”

He declared his commitment to change the narrative ahead of the 2023 election in the state, adding that “the most important for the Lagos4Lagos movement is to take back Lagos and return it to Lagosians.”

The politician had earlier revealed that his team was working towards ending the “era of giving party tickets to unpopular candidates” in Lagos state.