The Peoples Democratic Party has condemned what it described as “confiscation’’ of the Rivers governorship election results and demands the immediate release of the poll result to avert a crisis.
The PDP National Publicity Secretary, Mr Kola Ologbondiyan, in a statement issued in Sunday in Abuja, said that the party completely condemn the subversive act by soldiers, who were alleged to have seized and diverted the results to an army barrack in Port Harcourt.
He called on all lovers of democracy to unite against the “brazen attack” on Nigeria’s democracy, saying such barefaced “assault is only akin to a coup d’état and should not be allowed to stand”.
He said that Nigerians watched in bewilderment as soldiers, in the company of alleged the All Progressives Congress thugs, invaded polling units in Rivers, unleashed violence on voters, disrupted polling processes and hauled away electoral materials.
This, according to Ologbondiyan, is just because the APC is not on the ballot following its self-inflicted exclusion from the election.
He said that the use of soldiers to ambush the electoral process and confiscate results was an extreme scheme by the APC to enmesh the Rivers governorship election in controversy, seeing that there is no way they can take away victory from the PDP.
“We want Nigerians to note that the APC is frustrated that it is not on the ballot in the Rivers state election and for that it has resorted to violence, killings and heavy militarisation of the area; in the attempt to disrupt the electoral process, seeing that the PDP had already won.’’
Ologbondiyan said that the PDP already had valid documents of all the results as delivered from all the polling units where elections held across the state and that the figures were with all the stakeholders.
“Therefore, deploying soldiers to confiscate the results will not change the victory already recorded by our party in Rivers state.”
However, the Independent National Electoral Commission has suspended all electoral processes in Saturday’s governorship and House of Assembly elections in Rivers until further notice.
The suspension, according to the statement, issued on Sunday in Abuja by Mr Festus Okoye, INEC’s National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education, was due to widespread violence and disruptions that characterised the state’s elections.
