Rose Ejembi, Makurdi
Benue State chapter of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) said that the postponement of the 2019 elections by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has thrown the country into confusion, pain and anger.
In a statement signed by its state Publicity Secretary, Bemgba Iyortyom, the party lamented that most Nigerians who had travelled home from their places of work to perform their civic duty at quite some cost had been caught unprepared to bear the attendant additional costs of undertaking the exercise all over again next Saturday.
“National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members who were recruited as ad hoc staff for the election travelled over long distances at their own expenses and had to pass the night in open spaces under inhuman conditions, only to be left high and dry, battling to find their way back.
“Businesses were closed for the day, schools took the mid-term break and scheduled to resume after the elections, in conformity with an already structured calender, which will now have to be tampered with.
Iyortyom, while condemning the development, opined that the sense of despair, anger and pain were so palpable across the country that the situation rightly qualified as a national emergency.
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“The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Benue State condemns this postponement as a national calamity and lays the blame squarely at the doorsteps of the All Progressives Congress (APC)-controlled administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
“PDP sympathies with Nigerians over the incalculable losses they have incurred, both material, psychological and sundry, and this represents the climax of the close to four years of an era characterised by misery, lack of direction and insensitivity under the rule of APC.”
He said it was unacceptable that INEC under the supervising watch of Buhari/APC would cite “logistical” reasons as its alibi for calling off the Saturday vote, adding that, “for the electoral umpire to have waited till only hours to the commencement of casting of ballots before announcing the postponement smacks of a hidden agenda against the mass voting populations of this country.
“PDP in Benue State is aware that this postponement gifts the ruling APC manifest advantages in the regard that the party will not suffer any hiccups to its finances which are drawn wholly from various channels of the public coffers, but the opposition parties, like PDP, having expended huge resources already on the postponed poll, will have to go through another difficult process of mobilising funds for the rescheduled vote.”
Iyortyom, however, urged Nigerians and resident of Benue State to be steadfast and not be discouraged by this obvious ploy of a postponement targeting to dampen their desire to vote and as such disenfranchise them.
“We are confident that together, we will turn our feelings of anguish and the pains occasioned on us by this callously-executed postponement into a positive force and deploy same assiduously to the push to get APC and its costly brand of misrule out of power,” he said.