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The Action Congress (AC) has said the statement credited to INEC , Maurice Iwu, blaming the EFCC and the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) for the failed 2007 general elections amounts to a confession of a man who lacks the courage of his conviction.
The Action Congress (AC) has said the statement credited to INEC , Maurice Iwu, blaming the EFCC and the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) for the failed 2007 general elections amounts to a confession of a man who lacks the courage of his conviction.
In a statement, issued in Abuja on Thursday by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, the party said with Iwu's confession, at a lecture in Ibadan, that the elections were indeed messed up through illegal exclusion of candidates, among others, he is finally seeing the light and coming to terms with what all other stakeholders have been saying about the sham polls.
It said the continued claim by the INEC chairman, that he saved Nigeria from a political crisis by holding the deeply-flawed polls, is disingenuous, as the greatest catalyst for political, economic and social crises is election rigging, as can be seen in the recent cases of Kenya and Zimbabwe.
The party said the shifting of blames will not help Iwu, as he had all the opportunities, as the INEC chairman, to resist the illegal and unconstitutional exclusion of candidates which he now says were instigated by the EFCC and the AGF, apparently acting on orders from former president Olusegun Obasanjo.
'It is a mark of shamelessness and lack of principle for Iwu to say INEC was forced to exclude candidates from the polls, a situation that has now become a major ground for reversing the results by the courts.
'The truth is that until recently, INEC, the EFCC and the AGF were one and the same, a willing tool in the hands of a vindictive megalomaniac. We recall that in the case of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Iwu claimed that INEC had sought legal opinion, which said he (Atiku) cannot run for president. Therefore, Iwu's attempt to distort recent history will not save him,'' it said.
The party said while it will encourage Iwu to continue to confess on the historic mess he made of a rare chance to showcase Nigeria's ability to organize a free and fair polls, he should understand that his attempt at polishing his image will not work, no matter what his handlers, who are only interested in feathering their own nests, tell him.
'No good advert can sell a bad product, which Iwu is. He should stop insulting Nigerians by attempting to justify the failure of the last polls.
'On our part, we are satisfied that the tribunals have shown we are not just making an empty claim over the last elections, going by the sack of dozens of state and federal Lawmakers and State Governors, from Adamawa to Sokoto and Bayelsa to Kogi, and still counting.
'We will continue to pursue our cases at the tribunals, as a law-abiding party, as a way of consigning the sham polls to the dustbin of history and helping to evolve a better electoral process in the interest of our democracy, which has been watered by the blood of many patriots,'' AC said.