2023: Why Buhari Has Refused To Sign Electoral Bill – PDP

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has revealed the reason President Muhammadu Buhari has refused to sign the revised Electoral Act Amendment Bill into law.

Speaking at a media briefing in Abuja on Tuesday, PDP Spokesman, Debo Ologunagba said President Buhari has refused to sign the bill because he is scared of his party, All Progressives Congress (APC) losing the 2023 general elections.

The PDP spokesman added that Buhari’s delay in signing the reworked electoral bill is a move to erect roadblocks to the passage of the document into law.

Ologunagba asserted that the electronic transmission of election results will eliminate APC’s plans to manipulate the system, militarise the process, alter election results at collation centre and foist itself again into power against the will of Nigerians.

According to Ologunagba, the President’s refusal to sign the electoral bill constitutes an obstruction to the democratic principle of credible elections.

He said: “It is clear that President Buhari and the APC are erecting roadblocks to the passage of the electoral act amendment bill, due mainly to the provision for electronic transmission of election results from the polling units, which will eliminate APC’s plans to manipulate the system, militarise the process, alter election results at collation centre and foist itself again into power against the will of Nigerians.

“Nigerians can recall that the PDP had earlier alerted of plots by the APC to deploy all manner of shenanigans to delay the presidential assent until a few months to the 2023 elections to enable the president again cite being too close to the elections as a reason to withhold assent just as he did on December 6, 2018, after respectively turning down the then electoral act amendment bill on flimsy grounds in March and September of that year.

“With that, President Buhari set the stage for the APC and its agents to ferociously desecrate the sanctity of the ballot box by brazenly attacking polling centres, altering election results at collation centres, allocating fictitious votes to the APC, destroying electoral data, announcing losers as winners and ending up foisting the APC into power in 2019 against the will of the people as reflected by the actual votes cast at the polling units.

“Less than a year to the 2023 general elections, President Buhari and the APC are at it again.

“Expectedly, the current anti-people scheme against the electoral act amendment bill by the APC administration is heightening apprehensions across the country of furtive plots by APC leaders to orchestrate a constitutional impasse that can railroad our democracy into an emergency tenure elongation, induced election postponement, self-succession or worst still, an interim government situation.

“This growing tension calls for concern as it has the capacity to spawn widespread restiveness with consequential violence, bloodletting and attendant humanitarian crisis in the country that may affect the entire West Africa subregion, Europe, America and other parts of the world if not addressed.

“This is because Nigerians, especially the youths, have become more politically aware and involved, with a well-founded and implacable aversion to injustice, oppression, manipulations and undemocratic tendencies as being witnessed under the APC administration. Evidence of this mood became manifest in the EndSARS protest of October 2020.”