In an 8-page petition, dated January 27 and addressed to the commission’s chairman, Attahiru Jega, the former vice-president accused the president of colluding with party’s state governors and the other leaders of the PDP to rig the election. He is now asking that the primary be cancelled.
Mr. Abubakar’s accusations are coming to light barely 24 hours after he caused his campaign organisation to issue a statement expressing his willingness to dialogue with, and possibly reconcile with the president.
But responding to questions from NEXT, the spokesperson to the Atiku campaign, Garba Shehu, said his principal’s conciliatory statement and the petition before INEC were consistent. “Our position is not contradictory. The Northern Political Leaders Forum sponsored Atiku into the election. So the NPLF only responded to the pressure being mounted on Atiku by saying if the president wants a dialogue, he should come to them. It is strictly not an Atiku speech. Our petition before INEC will remain there. We are not withdrawing it.”
What is clear is that with the damaging petition he has filed with the electoral commission, the former vice-president and the president will not be embracing as friends soon. Shortly after the primaries, Mr. Abubakar claimed he was travelling to London to rest after a hectic campaign. But it now appears that the former vice-president spent his days away from public view compiling a massive document filled with accusations of bribery, intimidation, and rigging by Mr. Jonathan, the leadership of the PDP, state governors, and other supporters of the incumbent president during the presidential primary. “The party leadership and the presidency carefully planned and executed the monumental rigging of the presidential primary on January 13, 2011,” Mr. Abubakar said in the petition signed on his behalf by Ben Obi, the Director-General of his campaign organisation. “We call on INEC to jettison the result of the said primary and cancel same as having not been conducted in accordance with the provisions of the extant Electoral Act 2010, PDP Constitution 2009, and the PDP Electoral Guidelines for Primary Elections 2010.”
Tons of accusations
Mr. Abubakar’s petition to INEC, which was exclusively obtained by NEXT, lists series of actions, which he considers fraudulent, adopted by the president and his supporters to clinch victory in the primary. Indeed, the former vice-president alleges that a grand plan had been put in place to ensure Mr. Jonathan’s success by illegal means even before the election began. “The process leading to the conduct of the presidential primary election was programmed to yield a pre-determined outcome. A grand conspiracy against Atiku Abubakar was constructed between the presidency, the party leadership and the bulk of the PDP state governors to produce only one result - the success of Jonathan at the primary election,” the letter states.
Mr. Abubakar complained about almost every aspect of the primary. He faulted the composition of the National Convention and the Presidential Screening Committees, saying it was done in secrecy and had members who are ‘outrightly hostile’ to him. In this category, the former vice-president lists Godswill Akpabio, Adebayo Alao-Akala, Theodore Orji, and Sule Lamido, governors of Akwa Ibom, Oyo, Abia and Jigawa states respectively, as his chief antagonists who were included in these committees.
According to him, these governors are the ‘chief financiers’ of Mr. Jonathan’s campaign in their various states and therefore deeply committed to the president and their inclusion in the committees placed Mr. Atiku at a disadvantage.
Mr. Atiku further alleged that the PDP hid the identities of the committee members from him, an action he says contravenes the party’s guidelines for conducting primary elections. He further said that complaints made to the National Chairman of the PDP went unanswered.
Taking care of the delegates
Mr. Abubakar also provided new details of how the delegates for the primary emerged and how they were allegedly coerced into voting for the president. Not only were the delegates bribed by Mr. Jonathan, says the former vice-president, they were also threatened and carefully monitored to ensure that they cast their votes for the incumbent president. The former vice-president says that he had no knowledge of who the official delegates were up until the voting began and that he was denied access to the delegates and could therefore not sell his candidature to them. The governors were allegedly used for this purpose. “The accreditation of delegates was done in secrecy at state liaison offices in Abuja. In fact, state governors imprisoned delegates against their will at these locations throughout the night before the primary and bussed them to the venue of the convention the following day. It is clear that PDP state governors were under intense pressure from the presidency not to allow Atiku Abubakar to meet the delegates from their states,” the letter says, zeroing in on the governor of Akwa Ibom state.
“He [Godswill Akpabio] blocked all avenues for Akwa Ibom State delegates to meet with our aspirant. He even went as far as threatening any of them who dared to meet with Atuku Abubakar,” Mr. Abubakar says of the state where he got none of the 141 votes.
In the case of the Jigawa and Adamawa states’ delegates, Mr. Atiku alleges that the respective state governors were on hand to pressure the delegates into voting for their principal, and some of that, says Mr. Abubakar was even captured on television. And to cap it, he said the president paid money in bribes to each delegate to buy their votes. “President Jonathan doled out seven thousand dollars to each of the delegates, thus using financial inducement to make them vote for him.”
The spokesman for the PDP, Rufai Alkali, did not respond to messages and phone calls made to him in an effort to get his reaction to the allegations. However, after several phone calls and text messages, Sully Abu, the spokesperson for the president’s campaign, responded to NEXT enquiries thus: ‘‘ What is his evidence. Nigerians have a right to expect him to show more grace in such obvious defeat rather than play the spoiler in the nation’s democratic process.”
On its part, the electoral commission didn’t have much to say about the petition. Kayode Idowu, Chief Press Secretary to the INEC Chairman, said in a telephone interview with NEXT in Abuja that the electoral commission is currently very busy. “Whatever petition the commission receives, it looks into. The petition will be looked into. But for now, we are engrossed with the challenges of completing the voters registration,” he said.
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