The governorship candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance in Enugu State for the March 11, 2023 elections, Frank Nweke Jnr, has alleges that the Peoples Democratic Party recruited some staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission to rig the polls.
Nweke Jnr, a former Minister of Information, who made the allegation at a press conference in Enugu, on Friday, said that the INEC officials and ad hoc staff had been detailed to bypass the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System during the election in order to rig the outcome.
He further claimed that thugs had been mobilised to cause mayhem and generally disrupt the governorship and House of Assembly elections in the state with a view to dispersing voters at polling units in order to have opportunity to rig the elections, subvert the will of the people to achieve victory at all costs.
Nweke said, “Since suffering massive losses across the state on February 25, 2023, the PDP has held a series of meetings at various locations to perfect their nefarious plans to ensure that they disrupt the electoral process, compromise INEC staff and deploy maximum violence.
“A source that attended the meetings reported that they lamented that they were falsely led into believing that BVAS was impregnable by INEC and that manual voting was impossible.
“According to them, events in Port Harcourt and some parts of the country had demonstrated otherwise; and that they must now take advantage of it by deploying sums of money to compromise INEC staff, buy votes and cause maximum violence to scare voters who do not vote for them and intimidate others into voting for them against their will.
“They have therefore resolved to ‘buy’ INEC staff to sabotage the elections as described above, and also to specifically ensure that the original result sheets are neither brought to the polling units nor the ward and local government collation centres. Since the iREV malfunctioned last Saturday, they reasoned that they would calmly write new results when the representatives of other political parties disperse at various collation centres in the belief that results had been announced.
“The compromised INEC team is led by a staff of INEC called ‘Ifenna Onoh’ who for several years has been the liaison between the state government and in particular, the Chief of Staff, Enugu Government House and INEC officials. It would appear that the relationship has been groomed for years in preparation for this election.
He alleged that Mrs Ifenna Onoh has been a beneficiary of land allocations, and pilgrimage allocations and in exchange, has succeeded in recruiting staff for the benefit of the governor of Enugu State, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, particularly into the ICT department adding that they have been informed that sums running into hundreds of millions have been exchanged over the years and through third-party agents to conceal the money trail. Mrs Onoh is therefore under obligation to do everything in her power to ensure the declaration of Peter Mbah as the next Governor of Enugu State.
Nweke further said that INEC maintains a secret office at Fontana Hotels located at Independence Layout for this purpose.
In addition, they have also reportedly recruited security agencies into their plot. The role of the security services is purportedly for them not to show up when they start causing mayhem at polling units and collation centres until they have accomplished their wicked plans.
Furthermore, they have secured a substantial number of ‘election duty’ stickers and plan to use that to evade security by moving around in vehicles on which these stickers are pasted.
Speaking on, he said, “They have also produced Security Systems Uniforms for thugs to disguise as escorts to INEC personnel from the point of dispatch to a pre-arranged location where rigging will be carried out using the non-collected PVCs of voters across the 17 Local Government Areas.”
The former Information minister said he had shared the information with the National Headquarters of INEC, the State Security Service, the Inspector General of Police, the Chief of Defence staff and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.
According to him, the purpose of revealing the PDP antics to the good people of Enugu was to reassure them that APGA, his party, will do all that is possible to guarantee their safety and ensure that their right to vote on March 11 and see that their votes count is protected.
“We will not take lightly any plans to subvert or abuse the democratic process.”
But in a swift reaction, Enugu PDP Campaign Council, denied the allegations, insisting that Nweke’s accusations was a disingenuous effort at pre-emptive excuses for his expected abysmal outing in the election.
The PDP in statement by its Director of Communications and Spokesperson, Campaign Council, Nana Ogbodo, said that Nweke’s impact on the March 11 polls ends with making preposterous conjectures, nothing that the race is clearly above his ken as he has all the while been boxing above his weight.
