PDP Crisis: INEC endorses Makarfi faction, accepts candidate for Edo election

Osagie Ize-Iyamu, is the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for the Edo Sept. 10 governorship election, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.
Nick Dazang, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Deputy Director for Voter Education and Publicity, disclosed this in an interview with NAN on Tuesday in Abuja.
Mr. Dazang said the decision to accept Mr. Ize-Iyamu, candidate of the PDP National Caretaker Committee, led by Ahmed Makarfi, was informed by the court’s decision on the matter.
“The commission collected the nomination from Makarfi-led faction because he has a court judgment that says INEC should accept his candidate.
“Secondly, you will recall that it is only his own faction of PDP primary that the commission monitored,” Mr. Dazang said.
The PDP has been rocked by an internal crisis, with two factions laying claim to the party’s national leadership.
A faction led by Ali Modu Sheriff submitted the name of Matthew Iduoriyekwemwen as its candidate for the Sept. 10 Edo polls, after the Makarfi faction had submitted Mr. Ize-Iyamu’s name.
The Makarfi’s group, supported by all organs of the party, including the Governors’ Forum and the Board of Trustees, conducted its primary on June 20 in Benin and elected Mr. Ize-Iyamu as candidate.
On June 29, at another primary that was not supervised by INEC as required by the Electoral Act, Mr. Sheriff’s faction picked Mr. Iduoriyekwemwen as the party’s candidate for the Sept. 10 election.
INEC had said earlier that it would not accept any candidate until a court decides on the matter.
A Federal High Court in Port Harcourt on July 4 held that the May 21 national convention that removed Mr. Sheriff as chairman and constituted the National Caretaker Committee was duly constituted.
The court also declared that the dissolution of the National Working Committee and the National Executive Committee by that convention was valid.
In the judgment, Justice Abdullahi Liman declared that the appointment of the caretaker committee to oversee the party’s affairs was legal and in line with the provisions of PDP Constitution.
Mr. Dazang said on Tuesday that the commission had received nomination forms from 19 political parties including the All Progressives Congress (APC).
He listed others as: Action Aliance (AA), African Democratic Congress (ACD), Advance Congress of Democrats (ACD), Allied Congress Party of Nigeria (ACPN), All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Citizens Popular Party (CPP), Independent Democrats (ID) among others.

Comments

The story of how Nigeria’s census figures became weaponized - Feyi Fawehinmi

By Feyi Fawehinmi The story of Nigeria’s 1962 census never gets old. Southern politicians seeking to end the north’s dominance of Nigerian politics decided that the only way to do it was through the census. Population figures at the time determined not only parliamentary representation but also revenue allocation and employee distribution in the civil service. In May 1962, the first census under an independent Nigerian government began. There had been a frenzy of mobilization by politicians in the south of the country using pamphlets, radio, schools, churches and mosques. Although the final results were not made public, the preliminary results were quite clear as to what had happened: the north’s population had gone up from 16.5 million in the last census in 1952 to 22.5 million, an increase of 30%. But in some parts of the east, the population had increased by up to 200% and more than 70% in general. The west also reported an increase of 70%. What the preliminary results showed...

FG borrows N3.38bn To Aid Potato Production in Plateau

The Federal Executive Council (FEC) wednesday approved N3.38 billion to boost the production of potatoes in Plateau State. The Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, who made the disclosure said the money would be borrowed from Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) with one per cent interest rate and 25 years moratorium. The minister who said the loan was not fresh, explained that it had previously been cancelled by the federal government with the intention to make a fresh request for the loan on behalf of Plateau State which she said was responsible for 95 per cent of potato production in the country. According to her, following ADB’s comprehensive programme on potato production in Plateau State, 100,000 families and 17 local government areas of Plateau State would benefit from the loan while 60,000 jobs would be created by the initiative. “My approval was on behalf of Plateau State to support the potato value chain. There is a loan that we had previously cancelled from ...

The Cambridge Analytica files: the story so far

What are the allegations against Cambridge Analytica? The data analytics firm used personal information harvested from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without permission to build a system that could target US voters with personalised political advertisements based on their psychological profile, according to Christopher Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica contractor who helped build the algorithm. Employees of Cambridge Analytica, including the suspended CEO Alexander Nix, were also filmed boasting of using manufactured sex scandals, fake news and dirty tricks to swing elections around the world. How is Facebook involved in the scandal? The social media company has received a number of warnings about its data security policies in recent years and had known about the Cambridge Analytica data breach since 2015, but only suspended the firm and the Cambridge university researcher who harvested user data from Facebook earlier this month. A former Facebook manager has warned tha...

ATTENCAO

Search This Blog