The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) has alerted Nigerians and the international community to the real and present danger posed to Nigeria’s democracy by the desperation of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to retain power at all cost.
In a statement issued yesterday by its national publicity secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said it was therefore calling on all lovers of democracy within and outside Nigeria to join in the efforts to stop the PDP and its cohorts from truncating the nation’s democracy.
“Having misgoverned Nigeria since the country’s return to democratic rule in 1999, the PDP – realising that its time is up – has now resorted to a dangerous game aimed at either keeping the party in power at all costs or crashing the country’s democracy. This is a dangerous game that must be stopped, with the good people of Nigeria, not just the progressives, leading the charge,’’ it said.
ACN described the events of the past few weeks – during which the PDP is allegedly using some of its members who are known for doing the dirty jobs to scuttle the registration of the All Progressives’ Congress (APC) – as a throwback to 1993, when the then military junta supported the so-called Association for Better Nigeria (ABN) to scuttle that year’s presidential elections.
The party recalled that the dirty game started by the ABN snowballed into a series of cataclysmic events that culminated in the annulment of what is still widely regarded as the best election in the country, as well as the ascension into office of a man regarded as the most brutal dictator in the country’s history.
‘’What started as a mere game of political desperation in 1993 was to set Nigeria back by many decades, and the country is still reeling from the effects of that single act of high treason, sabotage and subterfuge. Sadly, 20 years on, it now seems that our country has learnt no lessons from what the ABN did, as we are back to another desperate times, with the PDP sponsoring some scumbags to stifle the growth of the country’s democracy,’’ it said.
ACN said there was no doubt, going by the revelations in recent times on the efforts to scuttle the registration of the real APC. He said, ‘’The revelations have been mind-boggling: A well-known PDP hatchet man and a card-carrying member of the party hired the apparently-naïve lawyer who filed the phantom APC’s registration request at INEC; An apparent card-carrying member of the PDP working in INEC is the internal contact of the saboteurs; The email addresses used by the phantom APC were culled from that of PDP’s publicity office, while the scallywags who have now donned the garb of ABN (under the African Peoples Congress) made sure to copy their emails to their masters at the PDP!
‘’Equally mind-boggling is how the phantom APC, backed by its contact person in INEC, short-circuited the process of seeking registration by using computer-generated forms and fake signatures, among others”.
via Leadership
