SaharaReporters has learned that some members of the Anambra State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are threatening to sue the party over fraudulent primaries to choose the party’s senatorial candidates.
The chaotic primaries led to claims that former Aviation Minister Stella Oduah, incumbent Senator Andy Uba, and Ms. Uche Ekwunife had emerged as the party’s candidates for the Anambra North, Anambra South, and Anambra Central senatorial zones respectively. A longstanding member of the party alleged that top party officials at the national headquarters in Abuja had collected N150 million from the declared winners in order to auction off the tickets to them. “They sold the tickets to Chief Mrs. Stella Oduah and Andy Uba to sell the tickets to them,” said the source. He added that Arthur Eze, a billionaire businessman, had also paid N150 million on behalf of Ms. Ekwunife.
A few days ago, several members of the party had told SaharaReporters that President Goodluck Jonathan had indicated that he wanted the state chapter of the PDP to allocate the senatorial tickets to Ms. Oduah and Mr. Uba. In addition, the sources said First Lady Patience Jonathan had coerced Mr. Eze to back Ms. Ekwunife, whom he had earlier disparaged as disreputable.
One source said the national headquarters of the PDP had appointed electoral panels to fraudulently deliver the party’s senatorial tickets to the three candidates who had paid N150 million each.
Some party members told SaharaReporters that, whereas Ms. Oduah and Mr. Uba pretended to hold primaries in Nteje and Aguata respectively, Ms. Ekwunife sneaked into Ekwueme Square in Awka at 4 a.m. and, with her dubious collaborators from Abuja, simply declared herself the winner.
SaharaReporters spoke late yesterday with three aspirants in Anambra Central zone and they all confirmed that the purported primary did not hold. “We challenge Uche [Ekwunife] to show on national TV any video evidence of the purported primary, including the delegates, the aspirants who contested with her, the votes scored, and the names of the members of the electoral panel,” one of the candidates said.
“The charade that Mrs. Ekwunife and her dubious collaborators contrived at 4 a.m. amounts to unprecedented impunity,” another of the aspirants said. He vowed, “We will definitely go to court to challenge this impunity. If the whole farcical exercise is not cancelled, a group of us will go both to court and to the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) to expose the criminal and civil aspects of this 419 scheme by Uche [Ekwunife] and other desperadoes.”
A coalition of senatorial aspirants from the different zones told SaharaReporters that they would call on President Jonathan and the PDP’s national chairman Muazu to immediately work on setting up a panel to uncover the criminal wing of the party that had devised what one of them called ‘“chere were’ [“wait and take”] kind of primaries spreading like wildfire all over Nigeria.”
One of the aggrieved PDP members in Anambra added that the fraudulent primaries were “threatening the success of the PDP in the 2015 elections and also malnourishing our democracy.” He added: “The now in vogue disdain for due process and rule of law by our leaders is an invitation to chaos and anarchy. In the name of justice, the PDP should reschedule the primaries in Anambra—and inform the aspirants about the venues as well as the names of delegates with immediate effect.”