INCONCLUSIVE OSUN POLL: APC counsels PDP on how to react

The All Progressives Congress (APC) Campaign Council for the 2018 Osun governorship election has chided the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for kicking against the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC’s) decision to declare last Saturday’s election inconclusive.

PDP candidate, Ademola Adeleke, had received the highest votes in the election, but INEC failed to declare him winner on the argument that the number of cancelled elections in some units exceeded the difference with which Adeleke was leading the candidate of the APC, who is his closest rival.

Though INEC had fixed a rerun in the affected polling units for Thursday September 27, the PDP had insisted that their candidate be declared winner of the election.

But reacting, chairman of the Council’s Media Committee, Lai Mohammed, in a statement on Monday, described PDP’s position as “excessive grandstanding”.

Decrying PDP’s reaction after INEC announced the election inconclusive, Mohammed said the action of the opposition party “reinforced the Council’s earlier statement that the opposition party was in panic mode prior to the election, and that it had no confidence in the institutions saddled with organizing the polls”.

The Council said “rather than resort to threats; the PDP could either go to court or decide not to participate in the supplementary election of Sept. 27th. What the PDP cannot and must not do, the Council said, is to engage in its trade-mark brigandage or to employ tactics that can short-circuit the democratic process.”

READ ALSO: #OSUNDECIDES: ‘The whole world has just witnessed a blatant rape of democracy’– Osun PDP

According to Mohammed, if it were to be when PDP was in power, “there would have been no room for a supplementary election in Osun because the PDP would have used state institutions to hijack the election proper, as it did in Ekiti in 2014. But in its deafening hysteria, the PDP pretends not to understand the real meaning of the outcome of the Osun election: That the ruling APC did nothing to prevent the state institutions that organized the election from carrying out their duties, in the spirit of true democracy.

”Local and foreign observers have hailed INEC and the security agencies for a well-organized election. We join them in this commendation. Our confidence in the ability of the relevant state institutions involved in the Osun election remains unshaken. So also is our belief that every disagreement resulting from the election must be resolved through the democratic process, rather than a resort to threats of fire and brimstone.”

 

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