APC Rejects Call To Postpone Elections The APC has rejected the call by national security adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki (retd), for the postponement of next month’s general election ostensibly to give INEC more time to distribute the permanent voter cards (PVCs). The party, in a statement issued in Abuja yesterday by its national publicity secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said Col. Dasuki’s call during an event at the Chatham House in London yesterday, had exposed the plot by the Jonathan administration to push for the postponement of the polls, using all sorts of cheap tricks. APC warned that under no circumstances should the elections be scuttled. The party said: ‘’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.” APC said Dasuki was only seeking to buy time for the struggling Jonathan electioneering campaign to gather steam, saying Dasuki is hinging his postponement call on the delay in PVCs distribution. “They know for sure that if they don’t postpone the elections, there is no way they can win. They are just terrified,” the party stated, urging Nigerians to reject in its entirety the ongoing plot by the Jonathan administration to postpone the elections, to avoid a constitutional crisis that could undermine the nation’s democracy. ‘’After realizing it will be rejected by Nigerians who have borne the brunt of its mis-governance over the years, after realizing 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,’’ it said. APC said the importance of elections cannot be over-emphasized, adding: “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 tricks to scuttle the forthcoming polls, while also hiding under the insurgency in the northeast. According to APC, “They are hiding under the needless controversy over the secondary school leaving certificate of our presidential candidate, the concocted report by the DSS alleging a plan to hack into INEC’s database and the fabricated report of Gen. 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,” the APC said. It further noted that the PDP government also launched an aggressive campaign to convince Nigerians that the APC 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 has now been published for all to see. ‘’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. According the APC, 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,” the statement concluded.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 13:34:41 +0000