Following the Appeal Court ruling declaring him the PDP flag bearer in Saturday’s Ondo gubernatorial election, Eyitayo Jegede (SAN) has called for the postponement of the election.
Jegede arrived Akure today, to the reception of a jubilant crowd. Soon after his arrival, he had visited the INEC office in Akure to present a letter in which he called for the postponement. This, he said, would allow the PDP to submit a list of fresh party agents since the Jimoh Ibrahim/Modu Sheriff faction had earlier submitted its list of agents under the assumption that Ibrahim would be running.
Jegede said the election should be postponed to fulfil the Electoral Act 2010, which stipulates that each party should make their party agents available to the commission, 14 days before the day of election.
He also submitted a letter he addressed to the Chairman of the Commission, Mahmood Yahkoob, demanding the postponement of the election.
“It follows from the foregoing that any list of agents purportedly forwarded by one Poroye and his fellow pretenders who had been illegally parading themselves as the state executive members of the PDP, Ondo State cannot be regarded as authentic,” the letter read in part.
“As it is, the peoples democratic party has not forwarded the list of its agents to the commission.
“Whichever way one may look at the situation on ground, the governorship election of Ondo state slated for 26th November, if conducted, will undoubtedly be in breach of the Electoral Act 2010 as amended.
“It is in light of the foregoing that I request you to differ the governorship election for Ondo State for at least 30 days so as not to conduct the election in flagrant violation of the Electoral Act 2010 as amended.”
But Mr. Agbaje said INEC had gone past the issue of postponement, given that it had distributed sensitive materials to all the local governments already for the elections.
He insisted that the commission was prepared for the election come Saturday.
“We can no longer talk about postponement of the election right now,” he said. “The matter is an internal dispute within the PDP and so we cannot be talking about postponement.
“If we postpone the election, we will be losing billions of naira knowing that we have already deployed sensitive and non-sensitive materials to all the local government areas of the state.”
He said the list of party agents would be received from the Mr. Jegede and the former one would be discarded.
The materials which were supplied directly from the vault of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, in Akure include ballot papers, result sheets and other forms that would be used to collate the results.
Mr. Agbaje said adequate security had been provided to escort the materials to the respective local government areas.