The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has said that the fresh revelation in the European Union, EU, report further confirmed its position that the February 23 Presidential election was rigged to favour President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress, APC.
In a statement signed by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, the party said the report did not only vindicate it, but showed that Nigerians have not been crying wolf.
The party, noted that the revelations of manipulations as detailed in the EU report further validated queries by majority of Nigerians that President Buhari was not validly returned for a second term in office.
It therefore, called for the prosecution of the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Prof. Yakubu Mahmood.
The statement read in part, “The world can now see that the PDP has not been crying wolf in insisting that the election was outrightly rigged with the cancellation of millions of PDP votes, alteration of results and allocation of fictitious votes to the APC.
“Nigerians are still in shock over the revelations by EU of how about 2.8 million votes were deliberately “cancelled without sufficient accountability” and how several returning officers gave no reason for the cancellations.
“More shocking is the iniquity committed at the national collation center, headed by the INEC Chairman, where the EU report exposed inconsistent numbers, distortions and “a large discrepancy of “1.66 million more registered voters, as announced by INEC on 14 January, compared to those announced by state returning officers during the collation of presidential results.”
The party recalled that Nigerians witnessed on national TV, how professors and returning officers were unable to reconcile result figures due to heavy manipulations upon which INEC declared the APC winner.
It maintained that the EU report had further exposed the iniquity committed by the Prof. Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC by listing “how ballot boxes were compromised, how essential materials were missing, how voter register was not always ticked as required” and how “manual authentication procedures were not correctly followed.”
The PDP commended the EU for the courage in exposing the evils committed by the APC and INEC in the 2019 general elections, saying the report reinforced the confidence of Nigerians in the expectation of justice in the quest to retrieve the stolen Presidential mandate at the tribunal.
