Anambra guber: Moghalu petitions APC, threatens to sue party

By Ikechukwu Okaforadi

One of the aggrieved aspirants in the just concluded All Progressives Congress (APC) primary election for the November 2021 Anambra State governorship election, George Moghalu, has petitioned the Caretaker Extraordinary Convention Planning Committee (CECPC) of the party over the conduct of the exercise which he said was nothing but a charade.
Briefing journàlists yesterday in Abuja Moghalu, who is also the Managing Director of Nigeria Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA), said it was disappointing that the party could claim that a primary election took place.
While insisting that there was no primary election that was conducted by the party Primary Election Committee led by the governor of Ogun State, Prince Dapo Abiodun, Moghalu said he will challenge the outcome of the alleged Primaries in Court unless the leadership of the party conduct a fresh election where the party faithful will have the opportunity to freely select who will be their governorship candidate for the November 6 Anambra State election.
He said “I will do everything within my abilities and the law, to ensure that the travesty orchestrated by Prince Dapo Abiodun and his team will not stand. I have appointed a legal team and we have gathered evidence including videos, pictures and sworn statements by party officials appalled by the outcome. I will work within the Appeals process of the party to present my case and I have the full expectation that the right thing will be done.
“In a few locations in the state, election materials arrived late in the evening, after both voters and officials had dispersed and long past the time when it was possible to conduct even a semblance of an election. In the rest of the state, neither materials nor personnel arrived. As a result, elections did not hold in any voting centre in Anambra state on Saturday, 26th June 2021.
“Despite this evident reality, the Primary Election Committee appointed by the leadership of the party and chaired by the Governor of Ogun State, Prince Dapo Abiodun went ahead to produce and announce purported results based on nothing other than their fertile imagination and motivated by their private interests and arrangements.
“Perhaps, it is the motivation of those private interests that caused them to produce results so dubious that they have made themselves and our great party the subject of derision across the state and in the country.
“In the 2017 Election for governor of Anambra state, a total of 448,771 people voted in Anambra state in an election that was keenly contested by 37 political parties and their candidates. Yet, Prince Dapo Abiodun and his team want to convince Nigerians and the world that nearly 350,000 votes were cast on Saturday, in the middle of the night, across 326 voting centres in 21 Local Government Areas of Anambra State.
“As we speak, no major television station in the country has one recorded video clip of elections taking place anywhere in Anambra state, yet there are thousands of videos showing voters across the state complaining bitterly about the fact that neither the materials nor the personnel for elections was provided in their locales.”
While calling on the APC to rally and conduct a fresh primary election as soon as possible in order to beat the July 4 deadline given by INEC for political parties to submit the names of their candidates for the November 6 governorship election, Moghalu therefore called on the national leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and to all those in the party who still believe in the promise of democracy and good government, who are committed to protecting respect for electoral processes and ensuring the rule of law to act now and ensure primary elections are properly conducted in Anambra State.