The leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has accused the All Progressives Congress (APC) of cloning Permanent Voters Cards (PVC) ahead of the general elections.
At a news conference in Abuja on Tuesday, the national deputy chairman of the ruling party, Mr Uche Secondus, said that the rejected PVCs during last weekend’s mock card reader’s exercise had substantiated what the Department of State Services (DSS) said about the APC cloning of voter cards in Lagos State, Nigeria’s commercial city in the south-west.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had detected some cloned PVCs which failed to pass the card reader test during last week’s exercise in Port Harcourt and Osun State.
The INEC had subjected the card reader machines, which it planned to use in the forthcoming elections, to test to see if the device could be trusted during the elections.
While the INEC was yet to officially announce its position on whether to go ahead with the use of the device, several political pressure groups, including the PDP are insisting that the errors recorded during the card readers’ test are too huge to be neglected.
But the APC is not keeping quiet over the accusation either, as the spokesman for the party, Mr Lai Mohammed, said the allegations were inanities and that the party would not respond to such claims.
The APC National Publicity Secretary, in a statement on Tuesday evening said, “As a government in waiting, we are busy investing our time and energy finding solutions to the myriad of problems and hardship occasioned by six years of President Jonathan’s failed administration.”
He advised Nigerians not to listen to PDP governors as most of them, according to him, have nothing to offer the country again.
DSS Raid
The Department of State Services (DSS) had raided the APC’s office in Lagos, taking away materials which it later said findings showed that there was an elaborate plan by the APC to inflate its membership data ahead of the February 2015 general elections.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) dismissed, as hogwash, the findings of the DSS presented to the media.
The opposition party said that the findings were great disservice to Nigeria and an embarrassment to all intelligence-gathering organisations around the world.
In a statement issued in Abuja on January 7 by Mr Lai Mohammed, the party also described the timing of the release of the ‘findings’ as a plot orchestrated in collusion with the PDP to distract the APC from its ongoing campaigns for the general elections.
It described as disingenuous, flimsy, premeditated, partisan and an irritant the conclusion that the APC had an “articulated plan to inflate the party’s membership data as well as hack into INEC’s voter registration database through the creation of party membership forms and cards to match INEC’s voters register across the country”.
