IMO STATE GOVERNMENT PRESS RELEASE
The attention of the Imo State Government has been drawn to the arrest, on Tuesday, April 21, 2015, of the Head of Operations Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Owerri, Imo State, Mr. Emeka Mbaneme and 15 other Officers of the Commission by the officials of Department of State Security (DSS) Imo state, while thumb-printing ballot papers and altering the result sheets of the governorship election held on Saturday, April 11, 2015, which the INEC in Owerri declared inconclusive and for which supplementary election has been fixed for the affected units on Saturday April 25, 2015.
In our initial reaction to the arrest of the fraudulent INEC officials in Owerri, we want to first and foremost commend highly the personnel of the DSS in Owerri for the arrest and for rising to their professional calling because with the arrest, the APC has been vindicated on its repeated claims that the INEC in Owerri has become too partisan in favour of the PDP and its governorship candidate, Hon. Emeka Ihedioha to the disappointment of men and women of goodwill in the state.
Before now, the APC in Imo state has continued to cry foul especially in the media over the unholy romance between the commission and the PDP’s candidate and the APC has also forwarded series of memos to the INEC headquarters complaining that the INEC in the state has been working with the PDP and its gubernatorial candidate and that it was against the backdrop of such development that the REC declared an election that a clear winner had emerged both in figures and in spread inconclusive.
The arrest of the Head of operations of the commission and 15 others would go a long way to unveil all the dirty actions the commission had taken against the APC and its guber candidate, Owelle Rochas Okorcha and in favour of the PDP and its candidate, Hon. Ihedioha. With this arrest, some Nigerians who didn’t believe our stories and the alarms we had raised, can now believe us.
No election took place in few of the Local Governments where the PDP candidate was declared winner. Figures were just allocated to him. All the local governments where he lost were where elections took place. He has INEC working for him so a lot of funny things were done in his favour. They allocated to him more than fifty-five thousand (55,000) votes from Aboh Mbaise LGA without result sheets from the polling units because none was entered for the party agents to sign. The story is the same in the few places he was declared winner.
And it was those places no result sheets came from the polling units that the INEC personnel in Owerri have been working dutifully to produce result sheets for them and to thumb-print ballot papers to back them up. They were doing it when the long arms of the law enforcement agents like the DSS caught them.
We demand open investigation and immediate parading of the culprits so that they can tell their ugly story to the world and also tell Nigerians who contracted them and how much they were paid by the Imo PDP and its candidate to inflict this electoral pain on Imo people. The electoral materials recovered from them should also be displayed to also enable Nigerians know that the Imo APC has been consistent and right on its claim that the INEC in Owerri has donated itself to PDP in Imo state and its governorship candidate Hon. Ihedioha.
The DSS and other security agencies in the state can leverage on the headway made by the DSS to do a thorough investigation of the activities of the Imo INEC with regard to the declaration of the governorship election inconclusive. The Imo PDP and its candidate have displayed a very high level of desperation for power in the state not minding how the people of the state feel and what they want. They are mounting pressure on INEC to declare them governor whether they win or not.
The investigation on the matter should also be hastened so that the culprits can be prosecuted and kept where they ought to be, to serve as a warning to others like them.
Sam Onwuemeodo
Senior Special Assistant to the Governor on Media