You cannot rig this election, PDP tells Buhari, APC

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has said that President Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressives Congress (APC) cannot rig the February 16, presidential elections.

The party said that Nigeria “is bigger than them and that there is no way Nigerians will allow them to rig the 2019 general elections or achieve their self-succession plan.”

This was contained in a statement Kola Ologbondiyan, PDP national publicity secretary and director, media and publicity PDP Presidential Campaign Organization released to newsmen at a press conference in Abuja on Sunday.

The statement read: “Our history as a nation has amply shown that no individual leader, no matter the authority wielded, has ever succeeded, at any point in time, in subduing the spirit of our nation or place our people under a siege and not even this strange recourse to importation of mercenaries into our country can change that reality

“The world can recall how certain leaders in the past attempted to subvert our constitutional democracy, arrogate excessive powers to themselves and how they failed in the face of the Nigerian spirit.

“Today, that Nigerian spirit, with which we won our democracy and nurtured it to this stage, is being assailed by the APC and the Buhari Presidency with their unrelenting constitutional breaches, attacks on our democratic institutions, violation of human rights, siege on our electoral system and opening of our territorial borders to mercenaries, all in the bid to subdue our citizenry and achieve a self succession plan, having realized that there is no way they can win in a free, fair and peaceful election.

“There is a ferocious attempt to take away our liberty as a people. There is total clampdown, arrest and detention of dissenting voices; invasion of media houses, manhandling and illegal detention of journalists by state forces have become the order of the day; but all these will not break the Nigerian spirit.

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“Our nation will never succumb to Buhari Presidency’s assault on our National Assembly, the attack on our judiciary and besieging of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) where President Buhari’s relation is being foisted as the head of the collation center.

“Nigerians have decided to vote out President Buhari, come February 16, and no amount of intimidation, clampdown and harassment can change that resolve.

“It has become manifest that compatriots, irrespective of creed, ethnicity and political leanings, are today extremely eager to vote out the Buhari Presidency which, out of sheer incompetence, has wrecked our once robust economy and brought so much poverty, hunger, pain and anguish to Nigerians, once reputed as the happiest people in the world.

“The Buhari Presidency and the APC have come to the stark reality that the influences on which they rode to power in 2015 no longer avail. They have come to the moment of truth that Nigerians have seen through their lies, propaganda, false promises, beguilements and holier-than-thou posturing and are now poised to take back their country at the polls,” part of the statement read.

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