Nweke, former Minister of Information, who made the allegation at a press conference in Enugu, on Friday, alleged that the INEC officials and ad hoc staff members had been detailed to bypass the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) during the election in order to rig the outcome.
Mr Frank Nweke Jr, candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance in Enugu State for the March 11, 2023 governorship election has raised the alarm that the Peoples Democratic Party has engaged the services of the Independent National Electoral Commission to rig the polls.
Nweke, former Minister of Information, who made the allegation at a press conference in Enugu, on Friday, alleged that the INEC officials and ad hoc staff members had been detailed to bypass the use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) during the election in order to rig the outcome.
He further claimed that political thugs had been briefed and empowered to cause mayhem and generally disrupt the governorship and House of Assembly elections in the state with a view to dispersing voters at polling units in order to have the opportunity to rig the elections and subvert the will of the people to achieve victory at all costs.
Nweke said, "Since suffering massive losses across the state on February 25, 2023, the PDP have held a series of meetings at various locations to perfect their nefarious plans to ensure that they disrupt the electoral process, compromise INEC staff and deploy maximum violence. A source that attended the meetings reported that they lamented that they were falsely led into believing that BVAS was impregnable by INEC and that manual voting was impossible.
"According to the events in Port Harcourt and some parts of the country had demonstrated otherwise; and that they must now take advantage of it by deploying sums of money to compromise INEC staff, buy votes and cause maximum violence to scare voters who do not vote for them and intimidate others into voting for them against their will.
"They have therefore resolved to ‘buy’ INEC staff to sabotage the elections as described above, and also to specifically ensure that the original result sheets are neither brought to the polling units nor the ward and local government collation centres. Since the IReV malfunctioned last Saturday, they reasoned that they would calmly write new results when the representatives of other political parties disperse at various collation centres in the belief that results had been announced.”
He continued, "Currently, INEC maintains a secret office at Fontana Hotels located at Independence Layout for this purpose.
"They have also reportedly recruited security agencies into their plot. The role of the security services is purportedly for them not to show up when they start causing mayhem at polling units and collation centres until they have accomplished their wicked plans.
"Furthermore, they have secured substantial numbers of ‘election duty’ stickers and plan to use that to evade security by moving around in vehicles on which these stickers are pasted.
"They have also produced Security Systems Uniforms for thugs to disguise as escorts to INEC personnel from the point of dispatch to a pre-arranged location where rigging will be carried out using the non-collected PVCs of voters across the 17 local government areas."
The former Information Minister said he had shared the information with the National Headquarters of INEC, the State Security Service (Department of State Services), the Inspector General of Police, the Chief of Defence Staff and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission.