The All Progressives Congress (APC) has rejected the call of Sambo Dasuki, national security adviser, for the postponement of the February general election ostensibly to give the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) more time to distribute all permanent voter cards, warning that under no circumstance must the elections be rescheduled.
According to the party, which spoke on Thursday through its spokesman, Lai Mohammed, the call by Dasuki during an event at the Chatham House in London exposed the hitherto clandestine plot by the Jonathan administration to push for the postponement of the polls, using all sorts of cheap tricks.
“Now that we have found the smoking gun, we are urging the international community, in particular, to urgently extract a commitment from President Goodluck Jonathan that the elections will hold as scheduled next month, and that he would respect the outcome, just as we have said,” he said.
APC alleged that Dasuki was only seeking to buy time for the slugging Jonathan electioneering campaign to gather steam by hinging his postponement call on the delay in PVC distribution.
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“They know for sure that if they don’t postpone the elections, there is no way they can win. They are just terrified.
“We call on Nigerians to reject the orchestrated plot by the Jonathan administration to postpone the elections; the constitutional crisis that would be triggered by such postponement is capable of undermining the nation’s democracy.
“After realising it will be rejected by Nigerians who have borne the brunt of its mis-governance over the years, after realising that its campaign of calumny against our presidential candidate has failed, the Jonathan administration has now started to play its last card, which
is the postponement of the election.”
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It added that the importance of elections could not be over-emphasised: “Election is the lifeblood of democracy; the mechanism by which modern representative democracy operates. It is the only way for the citizenry to renew and refresh the governing process so they can get the most benefits out of democracy. Therefore, anyone that tries to sabotage this mechanism is aiming a dagger straight to the heart of democracy.”
The party accused the Jonathan administration of “using all the tricks in the books to scuttle the forthcoming polls, including the plot to hide under the insurgency in the northeast, the needless controversy over the secondary school leaving certificate of our presidential candidate, the concocted report by the Department of State Security alleging a plan to hack into INEC’s database and the fabricated report of Muhammadu Buhari’s ill-health”.
“They tried to hide under terrorist attacks in the northeast and the fact that Nigeria is at war to shift the elections; this did not fly. They used the DSS to invade our data centre and then concoct the allegation that we are planning to hack into INEC’s Data Base; it did not fly, as INEC said its data base cannot be hacked.
“They launched an aggressive campaign to convince Nigerians that our presidential candidate is not qualified to run because he has no secondary school leaving certificate, but that also did not fly, as the certified results of his Cambridge examination have now been published for all to see,” it said.
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“They went and procured a fake report showing our candidate is suffering from prostate cancer, hence he is not fit for the high office of President, but their antics were discovered when the health institution that purportedly issued the report disowned it.
“Now they have launched their last set of jokers, which include hiring willing hands to make the television rounds saying there is no way the elections could hold next month, ostensibly because INEC is not ready, even when the electoral umpire has said it is ready to conduct the polls.
“There are also alleged plans to stage-manage some high profile cases of violence and arson, for which the opposition will be blamed and then its leaders arrested in droves, all in an effort to scuttle the polls. For those who find these hard to believe, we ask them to look at the sheer madness of a state governor placing a newspaper advert wishing our presidential candidate dead. The possible repercussions of this kind of provocative act are better imagined, had our party not been a peaceful party.
“In view of the above, we have decided to take our case to Nigerians and indeed the global community, so they can prevail on President Jonathan to allow the elections to hold as scheduled and to make a commitment to respect the outcome.”
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The APC said that never before had there been so much desperation on the part of any government to remain in office at all costs, even when it was clear for all to see that that government had run out of luck.
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1 comments
My question has always be, why should there be election violence, and why should they postpone election, if not for their selfish interest.