The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, failed in its bid to stop the declaration of President Muhammadu Buhari as the president-elect by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC
The agent of the PDP and a former Aviation Minister, Osita Chidoka, tried unsuccessfully to urge the INEC boss to abort the declaration.
According to him, there are 5.1 million voters who could not vote as a result of cancelled votes, difference in voters registers among others. He said they cannot be ignored as it is higher than the 3.9 million votes that Buhari is leading with in the exercise.
Speaking afterwards, Chidoka who did not signed the results sheet told newsmen at the centre that the party does not accept the result as representing the valid votes of Nigerians.
“We have made three issues; first after all the investment in technology, we required INEC, after spending N27bn in this year’s budget alone for technology, we had expected that today, INEC would have for the purpose of transparency not just for law would have projected to us the result of what the card reader that they used displayed about the people that went through the card reader verification, that singular act put a dent in the image of the election.
“The second one is the issues we raised about the number of registered voters vis-à-vis if what the chairman now calls collated voters means that 1.6 million people are missing in the voter register. We think that issue is substantial enough to require a resolution. We also believed that difference between the accredited voters and the voter votes cast which came to about 750,000 votes requires an issue to be looked at.
“We believed that the cancellations that took place in the election impacting 2.7 million voters required be looked into seriously. So, in our view this election required to be looked at again and possibly we would have had rerun, more importantly, we think that INEC should have looked consciously to the use of the card reader, the absence of card reader is a major violation in the election laws, it renders that election null and void, that is what the chairman promised us.
“So, for us in the PDP, we believe that this is a new low in Nigeria’s electoral history. Since 2015 we believe that Nigeria would have been making progress in the election, but violence in this election, the issues that have arises in this election, lack of transparency that we saw in this election did not increase, neither did it improve the belief of Nigerians in the electoral process”
