Senator Ayogu Eze of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Enugu State has said he boycotted the Saturday governorship election, alongside his supporters, to protest the removal of his name from the list of candidates for the election.
He spoke on Wednesday through Mr. Okey Ezirigwe, the media director of the Sen. Ayogu Eze Campaign Organisation.
Ezirigwe said that as of the day of the election, Sen. Eze’s name had not been restored to the list of candidates for the election, even after the Abuja division of the Court of Appeal ordered that his name be restored on the list.
“Though the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, was served the court order at 5pm on March 7, 2019, Sen. Eze’s name was not on that list even by the time the polls closed at 2pm on Saturday March 9, 2019”, the spokesman said.
Wondering how INEC expected Sen. Eze to meaningfully take part in an election where his supporters had been told through the INEC portal that he was no longer a candidate for the election, Mr. Ezirigwe asked: “Why didn’t INEC cancel and reschedule the election when it found out it had unwittingly changed the rule of the game just before the game started by advertising to our supporters and the whole world that our principal was no longer in the race and never took any steps to reverse that impression even after the court had asked it do so?”
He asserted that by not putting back the name on the portal and other relevant documents for the election as ordered by a competent court of law, INEC had inadvertently descended into the arena of partisanship by taking actions that tended to give the impression that it was no longer impartial.
He said that the scores ascribed to his principal “does not exonerate the INEC from its responsibility of conducting an election where every contestant has an equal opportunity before the electorate.”
