Ondo APC primary: Accreditation ongoing amidst allegations of missing names
As the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ondo State starts the accreditation process for members who will cast ballots in today’s party primary, allegations of missing names of potential voters pose a threat to the peaceful conduct of the exercise.
Party members’ names are said to be absent from the revalidated membership register even as It was discovered that names of certain Wards Electoral and Returning Officers are missing from the membership registry.
Party members in certain wards in the local government areas of Ese-Odo, Odigbo, and Okitipupa will not be able to cast ballots because their names are missing from the register. A returning officer in one of the wards in Akure confirmed to the The Nation that his name cannot be found in the register.
Speaking to stakeholders in Akure, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, who is the Secretary of the Primary Election Committee, stated that the committee is not obliged to produce a particular candidate.
Senator Omo-Agege reassured the aspirants that the committee’s only goal is to guarantee the legitimacy of the primary and the emergence of a candidate.
He said accreditation of the 172,025 revalidated members of the party starts by 10am while voting follows immediately by option A4.
Omo-Agege urged the aspirants to accept the result, characterizing the primary as a family affair.
“You have produced well respected people from Ondo State. This is a family affair. One person will be the flag bearer but we will have 16 winners. We should treat this as a family affair. At the end of the exercise we should not see anybody as winners and losers. We want your cooperation because the party has to win the November election.
“Let us work together as a family. Whatever the outcome, let everybody accept it. We have no mandate to return anybody. Nobody will be oppressed or assisted. Whatever results they bring to the local government collation officers is what we are going to collate.
“We expect a seamless exercise, a very peaceful exercise. It’s a family contest. This is not the general election. The only difference here is that this is a progressive state—an APC state. We are determined to ensure that, at the end of the eight years of APC, we are about to start another eight years of another APC administration.
“We believe that whoever emerges as our flag bearer is going to win the general election, and at best, we have been able to assure all of the aspirants that there should be no bitterness.
“We don’t want to contest that at the end of the exercise we have difficulty bringing everybody together to win during elections. I think everyone is on board.
“We are here to conduct an election. I’m not here to resolve differences arising from the revalidation exercise. What I do know is that the register has been given to me, and in the register there is a very marginal, negligible difference between what we have in the membership register certified by INEC and the revalidation registered. I think the difference is slightly under 1,200.
“You should expect that as a party, we have the right to revalidate because people move in and out of a party every time in any event, and not everyone has been alive to financial commitment to the party.
“So as part of that revalidation exercise, we have been able to weed out people who were just nominal members, people who are not financial members. Only financial members are eligible to vote in this exercise. I think that is the major essence of that revalidation exercise.
“We have been given a register here, and that register has numbers less than the original membership, so there should be no issue of over-voting because the total number of people that will vote are those on the revalidated register and not on the other one. We have already explained it to the aspirants, and I think they are comfortable with it.”
