The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)
has rejected the result of the Presidential election and plans to seek redress in court.
President Muhammadu Buhari was
declared winner having scored 15,191,847 votes as against its candidate, Atiku
Abubakar of the PDP who scored 11,262,978.
Reacting to the declaration of
Buhari as the winner, PDP presidential collation agent, Osita Chidoka said his
party does not accept the result as representing the valid votes.
PDP, he said we will explore all
options, including legal process in seeking redress.
So, in our view this election
required to be looked at again and possibly we would have had rerun, more
importantly, we think that INEC should have looked consciously to the use of
the card reader, the absence of card reader is a major violation in the elections,
it renders that election null and void, that’s what the chairman promised us.
“So, for us in the PDP, we believe
that this is a new low in Nigeria’s electoral history. Since 2015 we believe
that Nigeria would have been making progress in the election, but violence in
this election, the issues that have arises in this election, lack of
transparency that we saw in this election did not increase, neither did it
improve the believe of Nigerians in the electoral process.
“However, the PDP remains a very lawful
party, we believe in the law, we believe in the constitution of Nigeria, we are
committed democrat, PDP is a party that entrenched democracy in Nigeria, the
PDP is the party that made it possible for Nigeria to enjoy the fruit and
dividend of democracy.
“We will continue to support
democracy in Nigeria, we will continue to promote democracy in Nigeria but we
have a good message for Nigerians, we want them to remain peaceful, we will
explore all our options, including the believe (sic) that the legal process
in Nigeria is one of the ways to resolve issues,” he said.
He further argued that “the PDP does
not accept this result as representing the valid votes of Nigerians, we have
made three issues; first after all the investment in technology, we required INEC,
after spending N27 billion in this year’s budget alone for technology, we had
expected that today, INEC would have for the purpose of transparency not just
for law would have projected to us the result of what the card reader that they
used displayed about the people that went through the card reader verification,
that singular at put a dent in the image of the election.
“The second one is the issues we
raised about the number of registered vis-à-vis if what the chairman now calls
collated voters means that 1.6 million people are missing in the voter
register. We think that issue is substantial enough to require a resolution.
We also believed that difference
between the accredited voters and the voter votes cast which came to about
750,000 votes requires an issue to be looked at.
“Finally, we believed that the
cancellations that took place in the election impacting 2.7 million voters
required to be looked into seriously.”
INEC chairman on his response noted
that the difference in the valid votes and cancellation were insignificant to
impact on the general outcome of the election.
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