The governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai says that the party will not allow the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to use the excuse of outbreak of political violence to organise electoral fraud in the 2015 elections.
El-Rufai said this while receiving the Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Professor Chidi Odinkalu, at the el-Rufai Campaign Office in Kaduna, last Friday. He noted that the party was in custody of a document in which PDP had set out to use outbreak of violence after the presidential election to increase security personnel under which cover it would write the results of the governorship election.
“We have a document in which the PDP has planned to use the excuse of the outbreak of violence that is expected after the March 28 presidential election as a cover to write results for the 2015 governorship election.
“PDP expects that people will react violently as they did after the 2011 presidential election was rigged. With this, the party will deploy more troops and thus stop people from defending their votes. This is one reason we have been appealing to our supporters not to engage the PDP in any form of violence, that they should avoid confrontations and must not retaliate when they are attacked. It is for very clear reasons. It is for enlightened self-interest, as far as we are concerned.
“Even, if we believe that responding to violence is the appropriate response for us, Kaduna history and experience have shown that it is not the best response for the opposition, because what happened in 2011 and the reason why PDP was able to write the results of the 2011 elections was because people reacted to the outcome of the presidential elections and that was the cover PDP used to write results in the governorship election,” he added.
Party stalwarts present at the meeting include the Chairman of the APC Campaign Council in the state, Mallam Sulaiman Hunkuyi, the Director-General of the Council, Mr Ben Dalhatu Kure, and Director, Legal, Professor Yusuf Dankofa, among others.