There was mild drama at the national collation centre for the presidential election at the International Conference Centre (ICC), Abuja, on Tuesday when the representative of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Godson Orubebe, disrupted the collation of results, accusing the chairman of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega, of bias and tribalism in handling the cases arising from the elections.
At the resumption of the collation yesterday, the PDP party agent had raised his hand for an observation but, on gaining recognition, he lashed on the INEC chairman, accusing him of favouring the opposition party and being selective in treating the petitions sent to him
Orubebe said; “The day before, the PDP had sent a petition to you, but you refused to accept any protest from PDP. With me here, I have a presidential result already printed by the APC and scored itself.
”Mr chairman, we are beginning to see that you are very selective and partial, and we have lost confidence in you and what you are doing. If we can send a protest to you and you refused to attend to it, there is no need we are here.
“The essence of sending any protest to you is to look into the matter according to its merit or demerit. You threw the protest of the PDP out, but when the APC did same, you set up a committee and sent a delegation to Port Harcourt. We have complained about Kano, Katsina, Kaduna and Jigawa states but you refused to do anything.
“We are not going to take that because, we have lost confidence in you since you are selective, partial and tribalistic. We don’t believe in you any more as we cannot go on the way you are going. You have compromised and until something is done to our petitions, we will not allow you to continue with the process.
“We went to you quietly but you did not want to attend to us. We want you to set up a committee to go to Kano, Kaduan, Jigawa, if you want to prove your innocence. That is our stand.”
However, replying to allegations from the PDP, Professor Jega said: “You made two points that you submitted a petition which I refused to attend to and secondly, you claimed that there was a result by the APC, which you alleged that I gave to them.”
“As regards the first one, Monday, after we took the first batch of the collation of results in this National Collation Centre and went on recess by 4.00pm, as I was walking down back to my office, my PA came to me and said that here are some papers that Dr Bello Fadele, a representative of PDP told him that I directed him to give to him but, I told him that I did not tell Fadele to give any paper to you.
“Subsequently, Fadele sent me a text message, saying that there are petitions and he wants to submit them but, I told him that we don’t collect petitions, when we have declared results. But he said I should have left my office open so that he can submit those petitions.
“But I told him that our secretary to the Commission is not in the collation centre but in her office to receive petitions and bring them to me if they are important and since I have started collations, I cannot receive any petition here. When I replied that text message, he equally replied okay that he would see what he would do which I interpreted to mean that he was going to take the petition to the secretary of the Commission. As I speak with you now, I have not received anything from the secretary.
“As regards the result you claimed allegedly published by the APC on its website, I want to say that I did not give result to anybody and we have said that the authentic results are the ones announced here. We have warned everybody to be careful and ensure that they don’t declare the results we have not announced.
