INEC chairman Prof Mahmoud Yakubu
• To woo Gana, Adeniran, others back
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has described the declaration by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, that there are no underage voters in Kano State as a despicable act of cowardice and threat to the nation’s democracy.
The PDP said the INEC Chairman, in allowing the All Progressives Congress (APC)-led Federal Government to push him to make such false declaration, despite manifest documentary evidence in the public domain and even by INEC officials, has cast a huge doubt on the sincerity of INEC to conduct a fair, free and credible elections, come 2019.
PDP National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, in a statement yesterday, said the commission has obliterated a huge part of its honour by denying what is obvious to all instead of taking urgent steps to clean up the register and correct all anomalies ahead of 2019 general elections.
The PDP further invited “Nigerians and the international community to note the sequence of plots by INEC and the APC to hide the existence of underage voters in Kano and Katsina states.’’
Meanwhile, the Governor of Bayelsa State and Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) reconciliation committee, Seriake Dickson has insisted that PDP is a national asset owned by all Nigerians, and not by any individual.
Dickson who believed, that while the leaders of the party are important stakeholders in the scheme of things, the real stakeholders of PDP are the ordinary Nigerians in whom sovereignty lies.
The governor in a press statement signed by his Chief Press Secretary, Francis Ottah Agbo in Yenagoa yesterday, also described Professors Jerry Gana and Tunde Adeniran as icons of democracy and leaders of progressive politics in the PDP and the country, stressing that they must be wooed back to the PDP fold.
He governor said the most rational thing for all PDP stakeholders to do now is to start a process of building consensus and reaching out to players across party lines with the PDP leading the coalition to wrest power from APC in 2019.
The Governor also called on PDP members not to lose faith in the party. He said the next election is critical to the survival of democracy and the nation, stressing that history will be unkind to PDP leaders if they fail to lead a coalition to unseat the APC-led Federal Government, which he noted has put the nation on a precipice.
