Posted by From LUCKY NWANKWERE, Abuja on
The Action Congress (AC) has asked President Olusegun Obasanjo and his cohorts, including Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Ehindero, and INEC Chairman, Maurice Iwu, to resign from office for plunging Nigeria into a huge crisis through a mindless manipulation of last Saturday's state legislative and governorship polls.
The Action Congress (AC) has asked President Olusegun Obasanjo and his cohorts, including Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Ehindero, and INEC Chairman, Maurice Iwu, to resign from office for plunging Nigeria into a huge crisis through a mindless manipulation of last Saturday's state legislative and governorship polls.
The party in a statement yesterday said: 'Obasanjo should resign, the IG should go, Iwu should go, and a neutral body should organise fresh elections in the country.
'Anything short of that will be unacceptable to the good people of this country. The irregularities that marred the elections were deliberately orchestrated to elicit the kind of massive violence that has greeted the cooked results announced by INEC, in furtherance of the plan by President Obasanjo to perpetuate himself in office. We saw this coming, hence we continuously warned against it.
'Now, it is clear for all to see that this President does not want to leave Aso Rock, and that he is working to the answer, which is imposition of a state of emergency on this nation! In collusion with the police and the military, PDP thugs hijacked ballot boxes, stuffed them with thumb-printed ballot papers and doctored results sheets. The same law enforcement agencies also harassed and intimidated opposition party supporters, while leaving the ruling party thugs to hold sway in many states.
'When Nigerians now reacted to their stolen mandate, the IG went ahead to ban rallies across the country. That is the biggest joke of the year as no one, not even a million policemen or soldiers, can stop protests against injustice. You cannot ban protests when people are aggrieved. Afterall, it is said that action and reaction are equal and opposite! 'We also condemn, in the strongest terms, the crackdown on AC leaders in Ekiti and Osun states, where many of them have been declared wanted in the aftermath of the protests. This is the clearest indication yet that the police are grossly partisan and cannot be trusted to provide the conducive environment to organise free and fair polls."