Yemi Adedeji, Abuja
THE Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has berated the Buhari Presidency and the All Progressives Congress (APC) for posting fictitious figures as votes secured by President Muhammadu Buhari at the APC presidential primary, just to hoodwink Nigerians and create an impression of massive support for Buhari.
The opposition party also said that it has uncovered plans by the ruling party and the Independent National Electoral Commission ( INEC) to allocate fake votes for President Buhari in the 2019 general elections, stressing that the party has also devised legitimate strategies of exposing and dismantling such plan.
In a statement by its National Publicity Secretary of the party, Kola Ologbondiyan said that the resort to allocation of fake figures has shown that President Buhari and APC have lost hope of winning genuine votes in the 2019 general election and want to rely on allocation of fake votes to attempt to rig the main election.
The party said it had in a statement on September 1, 2018, alerted of intelligence reports that the Presidency forced a direct presidential primary on the APC so as to “eliminate delegates accreditation and pave way for allocation of millions of conjured votes, which they intend to use as basis to authenticate the fictitious votes they intend to declare for President Buhari at the general elections”.
The party stated: “Very senior officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), including a blood relation of the President, who is in charge of the commission’s data center, masterminded and pushed the plot.
“We want the APC and INEC to know that our party is already privy to the polling centers 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.”
“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.”
Ologbondiyan stressed that the 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.
The party said that the Buhari Presidency and the APC should know that their game is up and that no amount of machination would save them from imminent defeat in the 2019 general election, since Nigerians have already rejected them.