Emerhor faults Uduaghan over voting pattern in S’South, S’East

THE All Progressives Congress (APC) governorship candidate for Delta State in the April 11, 2015 election, Olorogun Otega Emerhor, has faulted Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan’s recent claim that the South-South and South-East geo-political zones voted 90 per cent for the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), while the rest of Nigerians voted for the APC.

It will be recalled that Governor Uduaghan, at a lecture delivered at Trenchard Hall of the University of Ibadan (UI) a few days ago, was reported in the The Punch newspaper as claiming that the elections of March 28 and April 11 had introduced a new reality to the effect that Nigeria’s electoral map has been redrawn.

Uduaghan was further quoted in the report as having said that the election has showed a deep division, which in his opinion, was perhaps more than anyone could have anticipated.

Moreover, the governor had claimed that it was the first time the entire North had spoken with one voice, with the old Eastern region also speaking with one voice.

Furthermore, Uduaghan had said that the entire North-West voted massively for Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, the APC presidential candidate, while asserting that the electorate in the South-East and South-South had generally voted above 90 per cent for the PDP.

According to the report, Uduaghan had claimed that these developments have placed a huge burden on the President-elect and his team to begin unification and healing process of the entire country.

But in vehemently disagreeing with Governor Uduaghan’s submissions, Emerhor pointed out that the people of the two zones were not allowed to vote and were criminally prevented from expressing their electoral preferences, insisting that far from having voted for the PDP, the party systematically rigged both the national and state elections in both zones by confiscating result sheets while fabricating and arbitrarily writing results in its own favour.

According to the APC gubernatorial flagbearer for Delta State, the few votes attributed to his party in the two zones, particularly in Delta, Rivers and Akwa Ibom states, were merely allocated to the party by the PDP, which he claimed had effectively compromised and usurped the role of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) during the elections.

Accusing the out-going Delta State governor of merely trying to rationalise what he described as the fraudulent and unbelievable results allocated to the PDP in both zones, Emerhor accused Uduaghan of being fully aware of his party’s fabricated victory and was merely being disingenuous and economical with the truth, which according to him, is well known to Deltans and other voters in the two zones.

He said: “This is why the APC in Delta, Rivers and Akwa Ibom is currently mounting a forceful and unyielding challenge to this shameful pretense at conducting elections at the elections petitions tribunals of the various states, seeking annulment of the polls and calling for re-runs that will see their various constituencies finally witnessing free, fair, credible and transparent elections for the first time since 1999.”

Noting that Uduaghan had avoided the fact that while the combined card reader records for the three states amounted to about 1.3 million votes, the PDP somehow miraculously received a total of over three million votes in these states, Emerhor went further to insist that the people of both the South-South and South-East were yearning for the wind of change represented by APC and were poised to vote for the party but for the subjugation of their voting rights by PDP governments in the zones.

Laying the blame for the under-representation of both zones in key National Assembly positions at the feet of Governor Uduaghan and his PDP colleagues in the two zones, Emerhor asserted that they, and not the President-elect, should be held responsible for removing the South-South and South-East from the mainstream of Nigerian politics in the coming dispensation, all in a bid to continue to pillage the resources of the zones.

While calling on the people of both zones to prepare to liberate themselves from the opposition status now foisted on them by the PDP, he advised them to utilise every opportunity of election re-runs to pass a vote of confidence on Gen. Buhari, stating that in spite of what he described as the illegal machinations of the PDP, the in-coming President, being a true pan-Nigerian patriot and anti-corruption icon, will rise to the challenge of treating the entire country as his one and only constituency by meeting the developmental expectations of the two zones.