The Vice-Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Obi, has given President Muhammadu Buhari a thumb down, saying Nigeria under the watch of his administration failed to build on the achievements of the 2015 general election by the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
This former Governor of Anambra State has accordingly accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of disenfranchising over eight million eligible voters in Eastern Nigeria, the hot bed of the agitation for Biafra, during the obviously controversial February 23 presidential election.
According to Obi, the election was deliberately programmed to ensure that the habitat of Ndigbo did not participate fully. He made this damning allegation in Onitsha, the commercial nerve centre of the region.
He said that out of the 10 million registered voters in the zone, only about 20 per cent were able to cast their votes: ‘’You will recall that on election day, I said the process was clumsy and we also had a major problem with malfunctioning card readers. Most people couldn’t vote as a result.
‘’When over 4,000 card readers got burnt, it became clear that something was wrong somewhere and INEC could neither save the situation nor allow people to vote manually. But in some other parts of the country, people were allowed to vote manually and it was accepted by the electoral body.
‘’How can you tell me that states like Yobe and Borno produced more voters than Anambra and Ebonyi states put together? The two states have been at war. I wonder how they got card readers that were working so well, despite the war situation in which they found themselves.’’