25th October, 2010
The Lagos State chapter of the Action Congress of Nigeria has lambasted Ekiti PDP for petitioning against the universally applauded verdict of the Appeal Tribunal, which returned the candidate of the ACN, Dr. Kayode Fayemi as the duly elected governor of Ekiti State .
The party said the reaction of Ekiti PDP is annoying given that the party, having unduly benefited immensely from electoral fraud that saw an impostor ripoff Ekiti State for nearly four years, should be grateful that the country is still tolerating perpetrators and beneficiaries of electoral fraud otherwise they would have been docked for electoral fraud.
In a release in Lagos, signed by the party’s Lagos State Publicity Secretary of the ACN, Joe Igbokwe, the party said the attitude of Ekiti PDP reinforces its insistence that perpetrators and beneficiaries of electoral fraud must be punished to prevent such harrowing experience as happened in Ekiti between May 2007 and October 2010.
The party urged the Ekiti PDP to brace up for a future where perpetrators and beneficiaries of electoral roguery must be made to pay for their criminal acts as that remains the best way to free the electoral process from such nauseating feeling that power must be manipulated to the whims of electoral fraudsters.
“We are gladdened that Ekiti PDP is showing its true colours as unrepentant opportunists with this obviously unpopular act, meant to cast aspersion on the integrity of the country’s judiciary. We want them to urge the NJC to order a full scale inquiry into the April 2007 and May 2009 elections and the petitions flowing from them for the country to know what transpires in elections where the PDP adopts crude means to steal the mandates of the people and sees any effort to retrieve such mandates as affront on their unholy means of ripping off the people,” Igbokwe said.
According to him, “We know that this petition to NJC is firmly anchored on the feeling of the members of Ekiti PDP that the system should remain permanently malleable to their whims and dirty caprices. They believe that the system owe electoral fraudster, which is why they don’t want to come to terms with the reality of their rustication and the country-wide celebration that attended it. They feel the system should remain permanently entrenched in the narrow interests of election riggers otherwise we do not see any grouse any person has with the sound verdict of the Appeal Tribunal. As a group that have benefited immensely from such callous affront on the electoral process, we might allow the members of Ekiti PDP the fun of believing that if the process is freed from their corrupt grips, it must have been wrong.
“Lagos ACN wants to urge the Ekiti PDP on in this case as it would unravel how a party that never won the votes of a people was able to stay in power for nearly four years. We promise that the enquiry would go deeper to serve as a probe of the remorseless rigging of 2007, which has unfairly benefited Ekiti PDP and has greatly distorted the face of democracy in Nigeria . We promise that Ekiti PDP’s petition will serve as a precursor to effective tracking of the aberrant system that makes it possible to have an impostor as unelected governor of Ekiti State for nearly four years.
“We want to re-state our demand that perpetrators and beneficiaries of electoral fraud should be severely punished for such criminal acts. We do not see any reason why those that deliberately perpetrated electoral fraud and employed same to rip off the people should be treated with kid gloves. We demand their punishment as a lesson and deterrence to prospective electoral fraudsters who invest in the sustenance of the system to continue visiting the kind of large-scale fraud that Nigeria witnessed in 2003 and 2007. We believe that paying lip service to curbing electoral scam will only embolden electoral fraudster as we witnessed in Ekiti and would ensure that the country remains stuck in the morass of electoral fraud and dubiety.â€