Ondo Election: Why we’re yet congratulate APC — PDP

Insecurity: Malami not Buhari’s mouthpiece, spoke for himself, PDP says

By Ihesiulo Grace

12 October 2020

News

By Tunde Opalana

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has said it cannot congratulate the All Progressives Congress (APC) and its candidate in Saturday’s Ondo State governorship election, Rotimi Akeredolu yet and cannot be stampeded into doing so, Daily Times gathered.

The party described an appeal by the National Caretaker Committee of the APC, Governor Mai Mala Buni, asking the PDP to congratulate the APC over the outcome of the October 10, Ondo governorship election as ridiculous and absurd.

Buni had earlier in the day at a press briefing he addressed said “as it is said, one good turn deserves another, and just like we congratulated PDP in the Edo election, we look forward to seeing PDP and the other political parties extend similar gesture to us in the spirit of good sportsmanship. By so doing, we will make elections in Nigeria healthier and attractive, rather than making elections a do or die affair”.

Reacting to Buni’s call for acceptance of defeat by the PDP, the National Publicity Secretary of PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan said “it is indeed ludicrous and completely absurd that Governor Buni is begging for endorsement of the election in spite of his awareness that the internal mechanism that produced his party’s candidate, as presided over by him, was faulty”

Addressing a press conference Monday evening, he said the emergence of Governor Mai Buni in the national leadership of the APC is a subject of litigation and as such, “his nomination of any candidate for the election is seen, even among his party members, as a nullity until the court says otherwise”.

He said “it will therefore be pathetic for Governor Mai Buni to attempt to use the PDP to build something on the nothingness of his position in his party. The PDP is too structured as a party to be used by anybody, under any guise, in that regard”.

This is as the party allegedly claimed that “a very top-level management official of the NNPC, through a northwest governor elected on the platform of the APC, diverted huge amounts of money, in dollar, from our nation oil resources to fund vote buying in the Ondo election”.

Ologbondiyan told Buni that rather than begging the PDP for congratulatory message, he should rather speak to this disturbing “stealing of oil money to fund his party’s vote buying at the expense of Nigerians” who are bearing the brunt of increase in the pump price of fuel and corruption in the oil sector under the APC.

He said the PDP will, in due course, make its official position on the outcome of the Ondo election known, while urging President Muhammadu Buhari to take steps that will accelerate the amendment of the Electoral Act, which was stalled following his failure to sign the amended Act of the National Assembly in 2019.