Admn l Saturday, October 13, 2018
LAGOS, Nigeria – The shenanigan of a result been bandied around as the outcome of the Lagos APC National and State Assembly primaries has come to some of us as a rude shock. This is in the wake of the confusion, crisis and violence that characterised the exercise all over Nigeria and in particular Lagos State.
The APC National Chairman, Comrade Adams Oshiomole had rode on the wheel of Change to insist on a direct voting systems for the primaries. This had encouraged most progressives and ardent members of the party to pick up nomination forms in the hope that they will have a free and fair opportunity to be elected to represent the party at the general elections.
The sad reality after the phantom primaries across most states of the federation and Lagos in particular is that we have not departed from the retrogressive crude era of Baba so pe and writocracy politics. It is on record that members of NWC were not on ground to conduct any primary elections in most wards and LGA of Lagos. And in the few locations where people gathered to express their civic right, violence, shootings and crises were the order of the day. Evidential proofs abound of the evil perpetrated in places Kosofe, Epe, Ikeja, Agege, Somolu, Mushin and so on.
Thugs and urchins loyal some candidates in Lagos were marauding all over the wards to carry out the scripted orders of a select few who have turned themselves into enemies of true democracy in the state. Not fewer than 4 individuals were gunned and matcheted to death with tens of others sustaining various degrees of injuries across the length and breath of Lagos during the ignoble exercise.
There is a trending video online that captured a factional APC Chairman in Lagos arguing with the NWC sent to Lagos that he was going to substitute the list of names of some candidates as ordered from above. This is nothing but arrant aristocratic disrespect and disregard of the will of the people in a supposed liberal democracy as ours.
This is no longer acceptable! All that tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to keep silent.
We hereby call on the Presidency, the APC National Chairman and the NWC to as a matter of immediate urgency look into the wrongful imposition of candidates and substitution of names carried out in the name of order from above/Abuja.
The dangerous effect of this mammoth day light robbery on our party and politics is not limited to just stealing of the peoples’ mandate but could be of fatal consequences to the fate of the party at the general elections in 2019.
We enjoin that an appeal committee of credible characters be immediately set up to look into the merit of each case on a state-by-state basis. This will go a long way in correcting and ameliorating the negative effects of the tyrannical ills of the poorly conducted primaries.
