By Dayo Johnson

AKURE—THE postponement of the election is an opportunity for the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to remedy “its apparent lack of preparedness to

conduct a minimally credible presidential election.” South-West zone of the Presidential Campaign Council of the Peoples Democratic Party said this in a statement in Akure.

The campaign council Chairman, Publicity sub- committee, Chief Akin Oshuntokun, said it is a matter of great concern that INEC appears unconcerned about such potentially explosive and puzzling lapse of sharp disparities in the distribution of the Permanent Voter cards PVCs, which systematically puts a section of the country at clear advantage while putting others at severe disadvantage.

He said: “A distribution pattern in which insurgency ravaged areas record over 70 per cent collection rate of PVCs to the 40 per cent average distribution rate in the relatively stable and peaceful South-West calls for concern and most certainly requires a lot of explanation. “The more puzzling still is the surprising acquiescence of the All Progressives Congress, APC, leadership in the South-West in an emergent electoral situation in which majority of voters in the zone would have been disenfranchised.”

It said further that there is no more eloquent demonstration of this tacit endorsement and connivance than the description of the postponement as a ‘coup against democracy’ by the APC national leader Senator Ahmed Bola Tinubu. “For the APC leadership to have referred to the postponement of the election dates as a coup against democracy, even as it became apparent that about 60 per cent of the people of the region would not have been able to vote, is sheer wickedness and a coup against the people they claim to lead.”