The vice presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Mr Peter Obi, has described last Saturday’s supplementary election in Kano State as scandalous and height of brigandage.
Obi said what all democratic watchers saw in the state’s rerun election amounted to ‘‘licencing our youths for violence and setting a very dangerous precedence.
“We are now institutionalising thuggery and rigging as processes of coming into power, which are very dangerous precedents for our country.
The former governor of Anambra State said proceeds, in the name of results, from what happened in Kano makes the entire electoral process ridiculous and shameful.
In a statement from his media office, Obi alleged that the Nigeria Police, which mobilised top officers and men to Kano State for the election, allowed political thugs to control the process.
He added thtat the police owe Nigerians and election observers a lot of explanations on what happened.
The presidential candidate, who querried the integrity of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), wondered why the electoral body was “quick to recognise and acknowledge election results from a process where machetes carrying miscreants took charge.”
He warned that with what went on in Kano at the weekend, ‘‘we are dangerously bequeathing to this society a trend that is bound to consume not only our youths, but the entire country.”
Obi said Nigeria further ridiculed herself and made the country a laughing stock for thinking that the kind of process witnessed in Kano at the weekend will produce leadership that can grow the state.
He decried the loss of quality heads in the election, particularly the killing of a professor in Benue, which he said was most painful.
“If India, with over 800 million voters, can conduct election without losing such calibre of people, if President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress (APC) could come into power in 2015 without such senseless loss of lives, why should this be the case now,” he asked regrettably?