Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has issued a bombshell statement in which he accused President Muhammadu Buhari of planning to rig the upcoming presidential elections with the help of officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
Obasanjo made this known at a world press conference, inside the Presidential Library, OOPL, in Abeokuta on Sunday, January 20, 2019. Reading from a 16-page address entitled: “Points for Concern and Action.”
The former president, who supports Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP, candidate Atiku Abubakar in the presidential election, has slammed Buhari as a cheat and accused the All Progressive Congress, APC, of colluding with the INEC in a plot to rig the 2019 election.
The 82-year-old declared that INEC lack integrity, impartiality and competence to oversee a free, fair and credible elections and accused the president of returning Nigeria to the undemocratic era of the late military dictator
Obasanjo alleged that Buhari and the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, have embarked on the president’s self-succession project, by recruiting collation officers who are already awarding results based on their projects to actualise the perpetuation agenda, in which the people will not matter and the votes will not count.
The former president equally said that the Buahri’s henchmen were working round the clock in tandem with security and election officials, to perfect their rigging plan by computing results right from the ward level to local government, state and national levels to allow Buhari, what will look like a landslide victory irrespective of the true situation and outcome of the election.
“Abacha era is here.” Obasanjo urged to rise up and do what they did in the time of Abacha and urged the international community’s to keep an eye on the unfolding anti-democratic agenda of President Buhari.
Obasanjo argued that the track record of the present INEC is terrible. “All men, women of goodwill and believers in democracy must be prepared for the worst from this INEC and their encouragers. We should focus on how to get Nigeria out of the electoral morass that the commission is driving us into.”
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published with a wrong date for the press statement. It has been corrected from May 19, 2019 to January 20, 2019. It occurred before the presidential election in which President Buhari was declared the winner.
