Joseph Bakare
The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has kicked as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) appoints a relation of President Muhammadu Buhari as the coordinator in charge of collation of the 2019 presidential election results.
Mrs. Amina Zakari, who is a niece of President Buhari, had recently been removed as INEC Director of Operations following outcry by some individuals, groups and political parties who deemed her as a threat to free, fair and credible elections in 2019.
Zakari had been redeployed from the strategic position of Director of Operations to National Commissioner on Health and Welfare by the electoral body.
But her new appointment as head of collation centre for the 2019 elections despite previous allegations against her has started to draw reactions.
The PDP, describes Zakari’s appointment as “another heinous machination by the Buhari Presidency and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to subvert the will of the people and rig the February 16 Presidential election.”
Speaking during a press conference on Thursday, the Director of Media and Publicity of the PDP Presidential Campaign Organization, Mr Kola Ologbondiyan, said the opposition “will not accept” Zakari’s appointment as it “constitutes a direct violence against the Presidential election”.
Ologbondiyan said, “You will recall that we have been raising the flag on how the Buhari Presidency, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and some individuals at the echelon of INEC have been seeking ways to compromise our electoral processes and open the way for the allocation of fictitious votes to President Muhammadu Buhari, having realized that he cannot win in a credible, free and fair polls.
“Today, we have been informed that the Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, apparently in furtherance of the plots to rig the Presidential election, has appointed Mrs. Amina Zakari, a blood relation (niece) of the APC candidate, President Muhammadu Buhari, as the Chairperson of INEC Advisory Committee and Presidential election Collation Center Committee.
“The Peoples Democratic Party Presidential Campaign Organization (PPCO) outrightly, vehemently and unequivocally rejects, in its entirety, the appointment of Mrs. Amina Zakari, President Buhari’s blood relation, as the head of the collation of results, in the same election in which his uncle, President Buhari, as a candidate, has displayed a huge desperation to win.
“The appointment of Mrs. Amina Zakari, who had been openly accused in various quarters as being the link person between INEC and the Buhari Presidency in their schemes to rig the election for President Buhari, constitutes a direct violence against the Presidential election and the PDP will not, in any way, whatsoever, accept it.
“This is the same Amina Zakari, who headed the ICT Department of INEC at the time that department was accused of manipulating the INEC voter register to accommodate fictitious, underage and alien voters, particularly, in remote areas where they plan to allocate and announce conjured votes for President Buhari and the APC.