The Peoples Democratic Party on Tuesday raised the alarm over moves by the All Progressives Congress-led federal government to tinker with the composition of the election tribunals’ judges in Rivers and other PDP-controlled states.
It said the idea behind the move was to replace those judges with those it described as “pliable judges to overturn the party’s (PDP) victory in the last general elections”.
Accordingly, the opposition party it was in possession of concrete evidence that the APC-led administration was set to transfer “uncooperative tribunal judges and replace them with malleable ones to overturn PDP’s electoral victory in Rivers, Akwa-Ibom, Abia, Taraba and Delta States and hand them over to the APC”.
PDP National Publicity Secretary, Chief Olisa Metuh, who stated this in a statement in Abuja on Tuesday, vowed that his party would resist such move.
The statement read, “Following the insistence by some tribunal judges on delivering justice, despite the pressure being mounted by the APC government, macineries have been put in motion to influence the outcome of the judicial process by replacing them with those already briefed to do the bidding of the APC government.
“Part of the plot is to use the Department of State Services and some unscrupulous officials of the independent National Electoral Commission to tamper with official records of evidence and other electoral documents in INEC’s custody for presentation at the tribunals, which would be manned by the compromised judicial officials.
“We have uncovered an unholy alliance between the DSS and INEC to interfere directly in the activities of election tribunals in some PDP states by removing and altering some records in INEC and instigating the APC to insist that there were no elections in those states”.
Metuh recalled that after the elections, the former INEC Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, had confirmed that governorship elections indeed held in Rivers, Abia, Taraba, Akwa-Ibom and Delta states, which are all controlled by the PDP.
However, upon prodding by the APC, Metuh alleged that the DSS and INEC were already interfering with the electoral process by using some persons in INEC to doctor the results and change the true position of affairs regarding the elections in these states.
