Eniola Olayemi
The Coalition of United Political Parties on Friday faulted President Muhammadu Buhari’s decision to again withhold assent to the 2018 Electoral Amendment Bill.
The coalition in a statement by its first national spokesperson, Imo Ugochinyere, said Buhari’s latest action portrayed him as a jittery President who is afraid of electoral defeat and yet desperate to cling on to power.
It said a President who knew that he did not perform should not be surprised and jittery that all security reports indicated that he would suffer electoral defeat in the hands of the coalition’s consensus candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar.
The statement read, “President Buhari has expectedly failed again to take advantage of the rare opportunity of the Electoral Amendment Bill to write his name in gold as the President that signed the laws that guaranteed electoral credibility in Nigeria.
“But yet again, as usual of him, he failed to rise to the occasion, being blinded by ambition and the love of the perks of office.
“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.
“Rather, the President is willing to allow Nigeria witness her most violent elections when he had the opportunity to sign the law which guarantees the freest and most credible elections in Nigeria’s history.”
Ugochinyere claimed that APC’s plan is how to steal the people’s mandate to perpetuate the present government in power.
To checkmate the move, he said the opposition would in the coming days unveil a strategy called “Opposition Code 20.”
He adds, “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 and President Buhari.
“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.”
