PDP Massively Rigged Elections In S/East – Kalu

Fresh facts have emerged over how the voting pattern during the last general election in the South-East was overwhelmingly in favour of the Peoples Democratic Party.

A former Governor of Abia State, who exposed the massive rigging plot during the election in the region, said the outcome was not a true reflection of the peoples’ choice because the Igbo did not vote for the PDP as widely believed.

Making these claims when he appeared as a guest on Channels Television programme ‘View from the Top’ on Monday, the former governor, who is a staunch supporter of outgoing President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, said out of the five states in the South-East, the PDP only won elections in Ebonyi and Enugu states.

He said it would, therefore, be unfair to accuse the Igbo of voting en masse for the PDP.

Ndigbo was accused after the election of putting all its eggs in one basket by voting PDP, a move which has effectively ruled out the South-East from producing either the Senate President or Speaker of the House of Representatives as no ranking federal lawmaker from the region belongs to All Progressives Congress, the incoming governing party.

Correcting the erroneous impression, Kalu said the people of Abia State in particular voted against the PDP because of their feelings towards Governor Theodore Orji and the overbearing nature of the President’s wife, Patience Jonathan.

The former governor, who lost election to the Senate on the platform of Progressives Peoples Alliance, insisted that he did not lose but that the PDP rigged him out.

He said, “The issue is that what happened in my constituency was a rigged election. Apart from Enugu and Ebonyi states, where the PDP had very good outings, every other state they won in the South-East was rigged.

“So, the Igbo did not make any mistakes, I feel bad when I see people blaming the Igbo. In the presidential election, the result brought out from Abia where I was, did not reflect the voting pattern of the people.

“In Aba, I can tell you and I will tell Jonathan, that he did not win election in Aba. The APC won the election there but when I saw the result, it was a different thing because the people were angry because of the attitude of T. A Orji and the occasional interference of the wife of the President. People were angry”.

The PPA chieftain, therefore, said it would be unfair to criticize a geopolitical zone for voting en masse for a particular party, recalling that in 1999, the South-West voted massively for the then Alliance for Democracy even though Olusegun Obasanjo of the PDP is from the zone.

The former governor also x-rayed the root cause of the PDP’s defeat in the last general election attributing it to greed and superiority complex.

Looking back on the formation of APC, Kalu said he and a former Governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, had planned to form a merger around 2007 but his political associates in the South-East scuttled the plans.

He said he was not surprised that the former Lagos governor went on to form Nigeria’s biggest opposition party, which went on to unseat PDP as the ruling party.

He said, “The PDP was bound to lose the elections because many people were very greedy. There was impunity; people in the party felt they were mini gods. And when you feel that God Almighty is no longer God and that you are the new God, you are bound to fail and that was what happened.

“The PDP felt that they could afford anything money could buy. My brothers, the Igbo didn’t understand the local politics. What you see in the country today was planned by Bola Tinubu and me.

“He is alive, you can ask him. He planned to go with the Action Congress and I planned to go with the PPA. We said at the same time, we could come back to the stage but the two governors we had from the South-East were not as forthright as Governor Babatunde Fashola. Fashola was the only AC governor at the time”.