Creation Of New Polling Units Skewed In Favor Of North – Accord, SDP Allege

0012583d35776e6256f7fdbb7c5c0dbfThe National Secretary of Accord Party (AP), Samson Isibor, and a national leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Prince Frank Ukonga, have faulted the Independent National Electoral Commission’s creation of new polling units.

They alleged that the exercise was skewed in favour of the North.

The two parties threatened to sue the commission for what they called a lopsided creation of the polling units.

Ukonga, a presidential aspirant of the SDP, said his party and some others rejected the new units, alleging that it was all part of a master plan to manipulate next year’s elections.

According to him, the exercise may be a ploy for the North to continue to dominate the South in the post-Goodluck Jonathan era.

Ukonga said: “If 500 voters per unit is the yardstick, it would have inadvertently tilted the balance to over 20 million voters for the North against only 4 million voters for the South.

“This is a sort of constitutionally institutionalised stratagem to always produce the President from the North after the post-Jonathan era. This is not acceptable to Southern stakeholders in the political turfs.

“We reject it and we are calling on INEC to cancel it. There is no basis for this creation at all.

“From the screening of voters’ register, it has shown that our actual voting population is down by almost 20 million and a chunk of this differential is from North. So, why give the area more polling units where there would not be voters? What then happens to the voting materials already produced?”

Isibor wondered why INEC should release the new polling units “on the eve of the 2015 general elections”.

He added: “They (INEC leaders) should have called a stakeholders’ meeting. How did they arrive at the delineation? It is a plot to further marginalise some parts of the country. We will go to court to challenge it because there is no basis for what they have done. It is a grand design to rig elections in favour of certain sections of the country”.