Dr. Ayim Nyerere, governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC in the Abia State governorship election in this interview dismissed the Abia State governorship election as a farce and the agitation between the PDP and APGA as what happens when thieves come to share their loot. Excerpts:

By Levinus Nwabughiogu

What is your impression about the April 11 governorship election in Abia State?

With due respect I don’t know if I might sound out of context not to refer it as an election rather I will say it was a rigging competition in Abia State because there is a difference between election and rigging. What actually took place in Abia State on the 11th  of April was not election but rigging because everything that has to do with election was quite absent. In election you are talking about where the wish of the people becomes supreme.

Where the people are allowed to come and express themselves as to whom they want as their leader but that was absent in what we should have termed election in Abia State. That is true in all ramifications. With every sense of humility, I stand to say there was no election in Abia State and that is why you are having the problem we have now which I don’t know how they will come out of it now.

Nyerere Anyim

When you saying rigging competition, it is competition between who and who?

Between APGA and PDP. You see, we are talking about a situation in this time of our democratic dispensation where in most polling units, there were no result sheets. In most polling units, ballot boxes were snatched with impunity. I don’t think it happened elsewhere because the degree of lawlessness, impunity in Abia State, I don’t think any other part of the country witnessed such.

What could you say were the roles of INEC and the police in all this?

They were part and parcel of what happened. They aided it because there is no how the original result sheets in all the polling units couldn’t be amongst the sensitive materials that were brought to the centre. There is no way it could be in the hands of some people without the knowledge of INEC staff and for the police men who were supposed to protect them to be there and hoodlums would come to the polling units and take all the materials from the INEC staff including the Ad hoc and INEC staff, put them in the vehicle and driven away.

So, how will you describe it?

Agents of other parties especially the APC agents were never allowed to come near until they finished whatever they wanted to do.

Something played out in Umuahia. The returning officer cancelled some local governments and later reversed himself. What would you say about that?

You see the confusion they created. You see it is not easy to go and steal something and conceal it. They know what happened because it is an aberration for an electoral officer or a returning officer to cancel a result and later reverse himself/herself instantaneously. It is not done anywhere. They are covering up something and those things by God’s grace will be exposed one day.

So what is the position of your party now?

What we have canvassed for is outright cancellation of the entire process in Abia State. However, we are not unmindful of the huge cost that it will cost the Federal Government or INEC but that is the path of honour on the part of INEC. You can’t talk about an election in a state where virtually everybody in the state will tell you nothing happened. That is the state of Abia State. So the only path of honour is to have the election cancelled. Where will you spare? The 17 local government areas had the same problems; one polling unit, two polling units in all the wards had irregularities. We went to the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission telling them our position, describing in details what actually transpired and what I expect them to do is to investigate and as I have said, the only path of honour for INEC is to cancel the election and start it all over.

What you are saying is that the decision to cancel only a few polling units in some local governments areas is not the best?

It is not an objective decision. On what basis? What happened in Obingwa happened in Arochukwu, happened in Ohafia, happened in every other part of Abia.

Indiscriminate thumbprinting

Look at situation where they were informed a night before the election that ballot boxes were being thumb-printed indiscriminately at various areas.

Was that the same situation during the Presidential election on March 28?

The same thing just that they perfected it in the April 11 elections. Why we are still crying is because the same thing happened. We said it after the March 28 elections thinking that they will do something but we didn’t know that they were going to do it on a larger scale.