Senator Rashidi Ladoja
The outcome of the presidential and national assembly elections in Oyo State may lead to an alliance between the Accord Party (AP), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party (LP) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) ahead of the April 11 governorship election.
This indication emerged yesterday after INEC announced victory for All Progressives Congress (APC).
The Minister of State for Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Jumoke Akinjide, PDP governorship candidate, Senator Teslim Folarin, SDP governorship candidate, Mr. Seyi Makinde, and former Oyo deputy governor, Taofeek Arapaja were at the Bodija residence of the AP gubernatorial candidate, Senator Rashidi Ladoja for a parley.
Although Ladoja refused to comment on the issues discussed at the gathering, those in the know said the second leg of the election was tabled.
Ladoja, however, made a strong case for the outright cancellation of the presidential/National Assembly polls held last Saturday, alleging that the exercise was fraught with irregularities.
He blamed the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the alleged irregularities, saying the commission purportedly pre-planned the exercise to fail.
According to him, there were reports of insufficient ballot papers, voting in the night without light, late arrival of INEC officials to polling centres, failure of card readers, manipulation of election results from the polling units to collation centres, non-conformity of number of accredited voters with total votes cast, discrepancies between figures on Form EC3A and EC3B when results moved from one place to the other and so on.
He sad: “As far as we are concerned in the Accord, we believe that the election should be cancelled. There was no election in Oyo State; either it was already pre-designed to fail or pre-designed to favour APC. I don’t know.
“I thank the electorate from Oyo State for coming out to vote, particularly those who voted for our party. We believe that the elections held on Saturday happened to be the worst election conducted in Nigeria.
“All the problems started from the permanent voter cards (PVCs) that were said not to be available. They were distributed in some places overnight.
“In the conduct of the election, starting from the morning of the exercise, INEC said accreditation would start by 8a.m. In many polling stations, INEC did not get there until after 10a.m and in some places after 12noon. When they got there, one material or the other would be missing.
“In some cases, they would start accreditation and after the accreditation, they would say the number of ballot papers they had were less than the number accredited. The excuse was that when the ballot papers were being shared, we were told that the number of PVCs that were distributed in polling booths was a certain number. We did not know that other people collected their PVCs overnight.
“In some places, after the accreditation, they would say ballot papers have not come. An example was Ido Local Government. Ballot papers did not get there until after 7p.m; in some cases after the election, they said the result sheets were not available and in many cases, they had to use ordinary sheets of paper instead of the prescribed Form EC3A”. .
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