The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has called for the resignation of the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami SAN, for advising the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to allow the substitution of the candidate of the All Progressives Congress in the Kogi gubernatorial elections.
This is coming after INEC gave APC the go ahead on Tuesday to select another candidate to replace Prince Abubakar Audu who died over the weekend and was buried on Monday.
According to INEC, the new candidate to be selected by APC will be the party’s flagbearer in the supplementary polls to be conducted on December 5 in the 91 polling units where elections were cancelled, prompting the electoral body to declare Saturday’s gubernatorial election “inconclusive”.
A Tuesday statement by PDP called on Malami to “immediately vacate his office for harrying and misleading the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) into arriving at the decision”.
According to the statement issued by its National Publicity Secretary, Chief Olisa Metuh, the party said it was disappointed that “INEC, a supposedly independent electoral umpire, could allow itself to succumb to the antics of the APC by following the unlawful directive of an obviously partisan AGF to substitute a candidate in the middle of the ballot process”.
The party described the attempt to introduce another candidate this deep into the electoral process in Kogi state as unconstitutional.
The statement said: “We are all aware that the two legal documents guiding INEC in the conduct of elections; the Constitution and the Electoral Act, have provisions for electoral exigencies as well as empower the electoral body to fully take responsibility for any of its actions or inaction without undue interference from any quarters whatsoever.
“We are therefore at a loss as to which sections of these two relevant laws, INEC and the AGF relied on in arriving at their bizarre decision to substitute a dead candidate in an on-going election even after the timelines for such has elapsed under all the rules.
“INEC as a statutory body has the full complements of technical hands in its legal department to advice it appropriately and we wonder why it had to wait for directives from the AGF, an external party, if not for partisan and subjective interest”.
The party promised to resist what it called an attempt by the APC to collude with the AGF in “a brazen move by the APC and INEC to circumvent the laws and ambush the yet-to-be concluded election by introducing a practice that is completely alien to the constitution and the Electoral Act”.
“Whereas the PDP, in honour of the sanctity of human life and respect for the dead, had since Sunday refrained from making comments on the conduct of the election, we can no longer maintain such in the face of the barefaced attack on our democracy.
“This INEC, under the leadership of Professor Mahmood Yakubu, has shown itself as partisan, morally bankrupt and obviously incapable of conducting a credible election within our laws,” the statement said.