The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is the biggest beneficiary of the 2019 elections and as such has no real reason to incite the public against the Presidency and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) over the outcome of the gubernatorial and state house of assembly elections.
The Buhari Media Organisation has said in a statement signed by its Chairman Niyi Akinsiju and Secretary Cassidy Madueke that the opposition party’s stance is in continuation of a deliberate effort to discredit the electoral process even before it began.
“PDP knew what it was doing when it launched strident attacks on INEC with a view to blackmailing the leadership of the election management body in the run up to the 2019 election.
“We had then drawn attention to what was clearly a conscious drive to tarnish the image of national institutions involved in the process. The targets of the opposition elements from the outset were the Police and INEC.
“And while the party soft-pedalled on the police authorities after the exit of the former Inspector General Ibrahim idris, it was relentless in its attack on the INEC leadership to the extent that the Chairman Mahmood Yakubu had to take certain steps to reaffirm the Commission’s independence.”
The Pro-Buhari group says it is surprised that the complaints are persisting even after PDP retained control of six states while its governorship candidates were declared winners in two states that were strongholds of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC).
This, BMO said, shows that the opposition is only interested in destroying national institutions for selfish reasons.
“It is amusing that the party is not relenting in its effort to thrash the process as the worst in the country’s political history when majority of Nigerians know how bad PDP-era elections were.”
The group said it will keep “frustrating PDP’s attempt to rewrite history and will continue to remind everyone that there is still no public record of the state-by-state breakdown of the 2007 elections supervised by the man who incidentally was PDP and Atiku Abubakar’s technical consultant for the just-concluded 2019 elections.
“And do we still need to remind Nigerians how the same PDP- era INEC announced the party’s gubernatorial candidate in Delta state as winner in Abuja even when the collation of results was still going on in the state capital!
“So what moral right does the PDP have to condemn an election where its candidates won states with dominant APC presence and also force a rerun in states where it lost woefully only two weeks ago? Is the party saying that INEC and its personnel perform creditably in only the states it retained and the ones it won?
“These are real questions that Nigerians should ask these people who are accusing INEC of doing the bidding of the Presidency because it declared elections in five states inconclusive in line with extant laws of the land.
“We know for a fact that a PDP-controlled federal government would have hidden behind the infamous ‘bandwagon’ effect to claim victory in all the states where its candidates were declared victorious in the Presidential election like it did in most of the elections it supervised between 2003 and 2014.”
BMO maintained that contrary to PDP’s position, President Muhammadu Buhari did not interfere with INEC’s constitutionally-guaranteed independence during, before and after the Presidential election as well as that of the gubernatorial and state houses of Assembly.
It said: “We dare say that no one would have been talking about inconclusive elections in five states won convincingly by the governing party two weeks ago, in the PDP era- the party would have forced itself on the people regardless of their choice.
“But this President who is keen on leaving a legacy of free, fair and credible election is only interested in ensuring that votes count and that’s what PDP benefitted from on March 9.”
