The All Progressives Congress (APC) has urged Senate to stick with the facts and issues by ignoring the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) grandstanding, cheap blackmail, baseless and subjective allegations of partisanship it is sponsoring against Lauretta Onochie who has been nominated as National Commissioner for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
APC said President Muhammadu Buhari’s appointment of Onochie as INEC National Commissioner has been subjected to rash, subjective, misplaced, and selective criticism by PDP and some interest groups.
The party in a statement by its Deputy National Publicity Secretary, Yekini Nabena observed that for PDP, Onochie’s capacity and effectiveness as a public servant and senior social media professional amounts to partisanship.
Nabena reminded PDP that one of its card-carrying members, Johnson Alalibo is the current Edo State Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), saying Alalibo who was also a former Deputy Whip in the Bayelsa State House of Assembly has been an electoral asset to the PDP.
“Since public service now equates ‘partisanship’ we invite the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to equally fault appointment of Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, the current INEC Chairman who was the immediate-past Executive Secretary of the government’s Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) as well as the earlier stated Dr. Johnson Alalibo.
“We equally invite the PDP to query the ‘unquestionable integrity’ of brazen PDP apologists such as Festus Okoye, National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee of INEC; Mike Igini, Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) for Akwa Ibom State, among others.
“We challenge the PDP to point to any of its defunct 16-year administrations that defended and guaranteed the Executive arm of government’s non-interference in INEC’s operation and the true independence of the electoral commission as President Buhari’s government has done”, he added.
