Barrister Chijioke Edeoga, the governorship candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the March 18 governorship election in Enugu state, in this interview with CHUKS NWEZE, talks about his experiences at the just concluded polls. He also spoke on the unacceptability of the Peoples Democratic Part (PDP), in Enugu state in the entire South East
I don’t know what you meant by my party. I have not read that statement that you are alleging but I just told you that the PDP made substantial amount of money available to its members; council chairmen, a lot of beneficiaries of the PDP, a lot of money was made available to them. So, multiple strategies were adopted by the PDP in order to affect the outcome of the election. In places where they could, money was given in order to vote for a particular candidate. In some places like Enugu East Local Government, announcement was made very early in the morning that ‘if you are not coming to vote for PDP, better stay in your house.’ In some other places again, like Enugu North senatorial zone, for instance, Lejja in Nsukka local government, where some people were dressed in police uniforms, most likely, these uniforms were sewed for them. They moved around, snatching ballot boxes. In Igbo-Eze South, a former member of the House of Reps, Patrick Asada, snatched ballot boxes, Ikeje Asogwa, chairman of Enugu State Universal Basic Education (ENSUBEB) snatched ballot boxes to prevent elections from going on. In several wards in Orba, which is the community of the incumbent governor, ballot boxes were snatched at the point when voting were going on. So, there were multiple strategies to reduce or scare people. In Enugu North senatorial zone for instance, which was considered my strong area, the strategy was to scare people away from coming out. So, on Thursday, before the election, armed thugs where everywhere, some of them were lodged in hotels. In Hotel Carolina for instance, some people were apprehended before the election. So, PDP adopted several strategies and one of them was voter intimidation in Enugu North, for instance, to make sure that the turnout was reduced. The second was vote buying, inducement and where they could, money was used. The other one was snatching of ballot boxes. Yet another one was bypass of BVAS, the mechanism of voting which the Independent National Electoral Commission introduced in order to have free and fair elections. You know some of these things in the fullness of time, the truth will unfold. There was a major bypass of the BVAS in many areas and all those things are going to unfold with time as we engaged in judicial process where we expect that these matters will become public knowledge. There was panic response to the first election, National Assembly election where Labour Party completely routed PDP and they were all worried that their political career built since 1999 will be in jeopardy if they didn’t retrieve the governorship by force. If they could retrieve it when things were orderly, free and fair but to try to retrieve it against the wishes of the people is something we are not going to subscribe to, it’s something that we have to fight judicially, as long as we are strong, alive and able.
