As the nation prepares to vote for a new president on Saturday, March 28, the Presidential Campaign Council of the All Progressives Council has alleged a “sinister and desperate plan by the Federal Government to deliberately engineer trouble in six Nigerian states in order to avert the imminent defeat on that day”.
A statement on Wednesday by the Directorate of Media and Publicity of the APC presidential campaign signed by Garba Shehu said “credible information available to the campaign from deep inside the federal government have starkly put it to us that the PDP administration has hatched a plan by which the States of Lagos, Imo, Bayelsa, Rivers, Kano and Sokoto will be racked by trouble of a serious magnitude in order to sabotage the presidential election and democracy in the country in a sinister, wicked and selfish objective”.
The statement said the crises to be fomented in these states “is clearly intended generate a crisis of serious proportions that would lead to either the postponement or the outright cancellation of the election in order to exclude the states from the first round of voting. By this plan, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC will be forced to cancel the elections and have these states conduct rescheduled elections a week later.
“The whole idea, according to these credible sources is that the government wants to buy time yet again, gain energy and pump resources into a renewed crackdown on popular will in those states. They deploy the entire muscle and resources of the federal government to steal the election in the six states”.
The statement alleged that “100 trained saboteurs had been deployed to each of the states to carry out these felonious acts”.
It advised Nigerians in the interest of the well-being of “our hard-won democracy and the overall interest of the nation to wake up to the reality of the threats and to do all that is lawful to resist the attempts by the outgoing Jonathan administration to bring down our democracy at the point of their exit”.