Candidate of the Social Democratic Party, SDP, in last Saturday’s Ekiti State governorship election, Engr Segun Oni, on Sunday, rejected the outcome of the election.
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, had earlier declared Mr Abiodun Oyebanji of the All Progressives Congress, APC, winner of the polls.
But Mr. Moses Jolayemi, Spokesman of the Segun Oni Campaign Organization, has accused the APC of engaging in vote-buying. He also accused security agencies of compromise during the election, adding the SDP candidate will not concede defeat, and the party will meet to take necessary steps.
According to Jolayemi, “The outcome is unacceptable to us as a party because it is a travesty of democracy; it is a rape on democracy and clear daylight robbery. The APC has taken advantage of the peoples’ pathetic state of poverty, and that is why the APC refused to campaign. They were not going round doing rallies; we were the ones campaigning because they knew what they wanted to do.
“Their strategy was simple: buy these peoples’ votes and that is why they kept the people in perpetual poverty so that they can be of use every four years.
“They know that it is difficult for someone who is very hungry to resist cash. Some of them have children that are of voting age; some have four children plus their wife and themselves. “If you multiply N5000 by six, it gives you N30,000, which is a huge amount to these people.
“The security agencies compromised. The ‘see and buy thing’ was going on while the security agencies looked the other way.
INEC is also culpable because the arrangement of the polling booth and the ballot boxes was awkward. You wonder why this should be so. The election may appear free but it was not fair.
“It was not free of violence anyway because the third thing they did was to make use of their thugs.
“We have videos of some of their thugs snatching ballot boxes. What did the security agents do, they looked the other way”, he stated.
