A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and former military governor of Ondo State, Chief Bode George, says the party given an uppercut in the February 25 presidential election because it deviated from its constitution.
He said the PDP failed to go into the election as a united front and paid the price for the lack of unity.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the February 25 presidential election.
The PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, approached the presidential elections petitions tribunal to upturn Tinubu’s victory but lost. He had since appealed the ruling at the Supreme Court.
George, however, said he hoped the apex court’s ruling would be in favour of Atiku and PDP.
He said, “I am still hopeful that we will win as we head to the Supreme Court, but if a decision is made, we must be prepared to come down state by state to resolve the crisis created before the elections.
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“We can disagree, but we must not be disagreeable.”
The PDP stalwart added that while the outcome of the case was being awaited, the party should seriously focus on reconciliation.
He claimed that the election was manipulated in favour of Tinubu, noting that the crisis in the PDP made alleged manipulation easier.
The former PDP Deputy National Chairman also accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman, Professor Mahmoud Yakubu of manipulating the results by resorting to manual compilation of results after promising to use the electronic system.
“The real postmortem analysis has to be done behind closed doors and not for public hearing. However, everybody now knows there’s no oneness in our party. It was a divided party, and so the opposition was able to manipulate it.
“It’s not a matter of discipline or indiscipline; it is well stated in the constitution of the party. We deviated from it, and we were put straight down; they gave us an uppercut.
“They manipulated the result of the elections, as we can see. What bothered me was that Prof. Yakubu told us that they have gotten a new system, and we are going to use an electronic system. Only to be told on the day that they had a glitch and reverted to the manipulation of the past.
“So, we are in court, and we will see what is going to happen. However, imagine if the party was a solid rock, nobody would ‘cheat’ us.”
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