Ondo APC guber primary: Council party chair alleges ‘importation’ of voters, calls for cancellation

Below is the full text of a statement issued on Tuesday by Akintunde Temitope, APC Chairman, Ondo East Local Government.

A CALL FOR THE NULLIFICATION OF THE FRAUD-RIDDEN APC GUBERNATORIAL PRIMARIES DUE TO DELEGATE LIST PADDING AND IMPORTATION OF NON-PARTY MEMBERS AS VOTERS IN ONDO EAST LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA.

I am the chairman of the party in Ondo East Local Government. We were shocked to discover the massive fraud that characterised the Saturday September 3, 2016 APC gubernatorial primaries.
A strange delegate list was introduced on the night of the election after everybody has gone to sleep only for us to wake up on the morning of the election to see a massively adulterated delegate list.
Names of 47% of the legitimate delegates in Ondo East Local Government were either deleted or substituted with people who are unknown to the party as exco members, some of the injected names are not even aware of the development and so did come for the primary elections.
It will be recalled that the National Secretariat of the party has agreed with all the aspirants that only the list of those who had voted in the National Assembly and other previous primaries would be used for the gubernatorial election. Also, the National Secretariat of the party released a definite delegate list, which is in tandem with the correct realities in our Local Government amongst others, to all the aspirants three days to the election on Wednesday 31st August, 2016, only for the midnight list to surface on the morning of the election.
We wrote a petition to the Primary Election Committee Chairman on the morning of the election and he repeated the fact that only people that had been voting in previous primaries would be allowed to vote with a promise to stand down the voting process for Ondo East and Ondo West Local Government. We were shocked that the committee never honoured the pledge. The copy of the petition submitted on the morning of the election is hereby attached.
In all, a total of 64 fake names were injected into the delegate list. The names unknown to the party are asterisked in the attached list. Many of the padded names were even made Ward chairmen from the land of the spirit. For instance somebody who never contested any election and some even unknown to be party member suddenly became ward chairman in ward 4, 6, 2 and 7 of Ondo East. The Video evidence will be provided. Our total valid delegates are 135 out of which 64 were disenfranchised meaning 47% of the delegates on the unlawful list used were illicit voters.
The votes by these illegal emergency voters has contaminated the entire votes of the state primaries, since the results were not collated on the basis of Local Government. It would have been easy to isolate the contaminants should the collation had been done on Local Government basis.
The absence of many of the illegitimate voters paved the way for “SEE AND BUY” voters that were eventually used to further corrupt the process. Many people were recruited from the roadside, including Okada riders, bread-seller etc who were not party members but just loitering around the venue of the primary election on Saturday, to vote on behalf of the absentee illicit delegates. I challenged the committee to kindly produce the unedited tape of the actual voting and we will I identify some of the “SEE AND BUY” voters that chose Candidate for APC.

OUR PRAYER

In view of the fact that the process is seriously corrupted by fake delegates list and illegitimate “see and buy” non-APC (some are even PDP) voters and the number affected in my Local Government alone is more than the difference between the winner and the runners up, it is trite to say the outcome of the primaries is not a true reflection of the genuine wish of the party. This is detrimental to the laid down procedures for the emergence of APC candidates.

A) We hereby call for the outright cancellation of the primaries and that a fresh primaries be ordered that will reflect the true reality in our party.

B) During the re-run process, accreditation should be done within the same compound as the voting centre so as to avoid the repeat of the situation where compromised security agents load non-delegates to voting centre and give them delegate tags.
CONCLUSION

Please note that by this we are not protesting against the eventual beneficiary of the fraud – Barrister Rotimi Akeredolu, but our protest is against a fraudulent process that produced a fraudulent, unrealistic and unstainable outcome.
We are also of the opinion that the runners up Dr Olusegun Abraham CANNOT be called upon to benefit from a clearly fraudulent process.
The only remedy that will produce unity based on justice is for a fresh primaries to be conducted and genuine winner to emerge. The result declared on Saturday is not the reflection of the opinion of our party in Ondo State but that of some interests outside the state, which is why there was no celebration in the land despite such an outwardly nice looking lay-out the party put up around the primary election. Some are claiming that the fraud has the support of President Buhari, but we are aware that our amiable President is against corruption in any shade or form.
Our party prides itself in its anti-corruption stand, we therefore cannot become the promoter of padding, impersonation, mutilation and manipulation in the name of political expediency.
What Nigerians saw as a nicely delivered primaries on TV was the birth of an illicitly conceived child but glamorously delivered, the result still remains a bastard.

Akintunde Temitope
APC Chairman, Ondo East Local Government.