Refusal to Sign Electoral Act Amendment Bill, Invitation to Anarchy, Says CUPP

By Udora Orizu in Abuja

Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP) has described the refusal of assent to the 2018 Electoral Act amendment Bill by President Muhammadu Buhari as an invitation to electoral anarchy.

In a statement issued on Friday by its spokesperson, Ikenga Ugochinyere, CUPP said

President Buhari had expectedly failed again to take advantage of the rare opportunity presented by the Electoral Act Amendment Bill to write his name as the President that signed the law that guaranteed electoral credibility in Nigeria.

“It is an act of clear desperation that the President had shown. For each of the four times the Electoral Amendment Bill was presented to him for assent, he waited until the last day of his constitutionally allowed 30 days. Nigerians should also be reminded that throughout the amendment process, President Buhari never made any suggestions or proposals to the National Assembly for the improvement of our electoral process but kept delaying and indulging in unnecessary hide and seek until this last minute,” Ugochinyere said.

He lamented that signing the Electoral Amendment Bill into law, would have guaranteed the conduct of the freest and most credible election in Nigeria’s history. He fumed that the refusal of presidential assent would present the conditions for violence in next year’s general elections.

However, he revealed that to checkmate a failed regime from this plot to steal the mandate of the Nigerian people in the February 2019 presidential elections, the opposition will in the coming days unveil the neutralisation strategy: the Opposition Code 20.

“This Code is as enshrined in Section 20 of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act which allows citizens to perform policing duties of arrest. The section provides that “a private person may arrest a suspect in Nigeria, who in his presence, commits an offence or whom he reasonably suspects of having committed an offence for which the Police is entitled to arrest without a warrant. This Code is the effective counter measure to the stealing and rigging plot of the APC and President Buhari.”

The CUPP calls on the INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, to stand firm and resist all attempts to rig the 2019 general elections by reintroducing the incident forms and pre-loading the card reader machines with the details already generated through the controversial cash-for vote/Tradermoni policy supervised by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.

The coalition party also urged Yakubu to insist on implementing all the innovations already successfully test run in the Ekiti and Osun elections which they said were only devalued by the involvement and interference of the Police and other security agencies in the electoral process.

Ugonchinyere called on all PVC bearing Nigerians to vote out all APC candidates at all levels.

“Nigerians have had enough of the Buhari misfortune and are resolved on consigning it to history where generations shall be taught on the kind of persons not to be elected President in any country ever again. President Buhari by all indications is willing to plunge Nigeria into electoral crisis worse than those that twice directly led to the collapse of democracy after the 1963 and 1983 general elections,” he said