PDP: Buhari’s refusal to sign electoral bill may cause violence

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) says the delay in signing the electoral act amendment bill into law by President Muhammadu Buhari is causing tension in the country. 

Debo Ologunagba, PDP publicity secretary, said this on Tuesday at a media briefing in Abuja.

The opposition party’s spokesman said the “growing tension” has the potential to cause violence, which might affect West Africa and other regions.

Ologunagba said Buhari’s “refusal to sign the electoral act amendment bill constitutes an obstruction to the democratic principle of credible elections”, adding that an electoral process that does not ensure free, fair and transparent transmission of election results from the polling units leads to “unconstitutional change of government against the will of the people”.

“It is clear that President Buhari and the APC are erecting roadblocks to the passage of the electoral act amendment bill, due mainly to the provision for electronic transmission of election results from the polling units, which will eliminate APC’s plans to manipulate the system, militarise the process, alter election results at collation centre and foist itself again into power against the will of Nigerians,” Ologunagba said.

“Nigerians can recall that the PDP had earlier alerted of plots by the APC to deploy all manner of shenanigans to delay the presidential assent until a few months to the 2023 elections to enable the president again cite being too close to the elections as a reason to withhold assent just as he did on December 6, 2018, after respectively turning down the then electoral act amendment bill on flimsy grounds in March and September of that year.

“With that, President Buhari set the stage for the APC and its agents to ferociously desecrate the sanctity of the ballot box by brazenly attacking polling centres, altering election results at collation centres, allocating fictitious votes to the APC, destroying electoral data, announcing losers as winners and ending up foisting the APC into power in 2019 against the will of the people as reflected by the actual votes cast at the polling units.

“Less than a year to the 2023 general elections, President Buhari and the APC are at it again.

“Expectedly, the current anti-people scheme against the electoral act amendment bill by the APC administration is heightening apprehensions across the country of furtive plots by APC leaders to orchestrate a constitutional impasse that can railroad our democracy into an emergency tenure elongation, induced election postponement, self-succession or worst still, an interim government situation.

“This growing tension calls for concern as it has the capacity to spawn widespread restiveness with consequential violence, bloodletting and attendant humanitarian crisis in the country that may affect the entire West Africa subregion, Europe, America and other parts of the world if not addressed.

“This is because Nigerians, especially the youths, have become more politically aware and involved, with a well-founded and implacable aversion to injustice, oppression, manipulations and undemocratic tendencies as being witnessed under the APC administration. Evidence of this mood became manifest in the EndSARS protest of October 2020.”

The opposition party called on Nigerians and civil society organisations (CSOs) to prevail on Buhari to sign the bill into law to “avert an impending crisis in our country”.