The National Working Committee (NWC) of the Peoples Democratic Party has been urged to cancel the party’s primaries for the House of Assembly and House of Representatives scheduled to hold on Sunday in Lagos, due to some irregularities that may smear the process.
Mr. Philips Aivoji the Lagos State PDP Chairman made the appeal while addressing newsmen in a conference held at the instance of other state executives of the party, governorship aspirants and party leaders.
In his address Aivoji notes that to the utter dismay of the state executive, the ad hoc delegates list brought by the electoral committees for both primaries does not reflect the authentic elected adhoc delegates.
The conduct of the primaries suffered a hitch as delegates and aspirants at various designated venues in the local government delegates waited endlessly for the arrival of party’s election officials from its national headquarters.
Mr Aivoji said: As law abiding members of our great party, we collectively reject this list and we cannot guarantee, free, fair and credible party primaries that we have sworn to conduct.
“The processes have been compromised ab initio and skewed to favour a particular aspirant.
“We, therefore, call for outright cancellation of the election exercise, doing otherwise will jeopardise the chances of the party at the 2023 polls,” Aivoji said.
He also faulted the untoward development that characterised the process, adding that names elected adhoc delegates were substituted with another.
“The entire state executive committee of the Lagos state PDP and five of the six Gubernatorial aspirants, reject in its entirety, the Ad-Hoc delegate list brought by the electoral committee to Lagos state for the purpose of conducting the primaries.
“We are all shocked to see that the list does not reflect the authentic elected Ad-Hoc delegates as conducted by organs of the party at the ward level and supervised by the DSS and INEC.
“It is imperative to state that copies of the Ad-Hoc list that emanated from the state and submitted to INEC are completely different from the one brought by the committee for the purpose of the exercise.
“We realised that contrary to the provision of our great party and the electoral guidelines of the party, the election committee came to the state with list of venues and already chosen electoral officers.”
According to him, this is the responsibility of the state executive committee of the party and therefore, totally unacceptable.
He said the committee Chairman and Secretary of the Election Committee meant to conduct the State House of Assembly Primary election had not reported to the state chairman or state organ of the party.
“Up till this moment, we cannot reach out to the committee chairman and secretary, their telephones have either been switched off or unreachable.”₩Aivoji said.
The chairman said if the exercise was allowed to carry on, it would also lead to a plethora of endless litigations afterwards.
He said the process that threw up the authentic delegates list was done in consonance with the constitution of the party as all relevant stakeholders were consulted and carried along.
Mr Aivoji said: ”We want to know the person at the national level that gave them (electoral committee) the order not to consult the state executives in the exercise.
“We want to get this list right because as we speak, we are toying with the lives of millions of Lagos residents.
“We have been in the valley for so long, this is an opportunity for us to get it right to win the general elections that are coming in the state.
“We must douse the tension now because if we go on with this process, we cannot guarantee the safety of the committee that came from Abuja.”
According to him, what the electoral committee intends to do is to cook up a list of candidates at a venue.
He said if the party missed it now, it would be unfortunate.
Some of the PDP governorship candidates at the conference included Ade Dosunmu, Olanrewaju Jim- Kamal, Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, and Adedeji Doherty.