The 2019 Election Review Committee of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has revealed how some governors of the party and other leaders of the party betrayed its candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, in the 2019 presidential election.
Atiku ran against President Muhammadu Buhari, who was announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission as the winner.
The committee, headed by the Bauchi State Governor, Senator Bala Mohammed, however, warned the party not to rely solely on regional votes if it hoped to reclaim power at the centre in 2023.
The committee also said that Atiku was not popular in some northern states, because “his statesmanship came to be seen as weakness as many in the north felt that he was too detribalised a candidate.”
The 14-member committee was set up after the PDP’s 87th National Executive Committee (NEC) in 2019, to review the performance of the party in the election.
A copy of the 93-page report was submitted on March 17, this year. It said PDP’s demographic inferiority would not be strong enough for the party to reclaim power in 2023.
The report stated that some governors elected on PDP platform “either deliberately sabotaged the fortunes of the party or remained insensitive during the presidential election.”
This, it stated, was because the electoral fortunes of these governors that later secured re-election, “contrasted sharply with the votes cast for the party’s presidential candidate who, himself towered head and shoulder above the candidate of APC.
“In some states, the PDP governors focused more on their re-election and abandoned the party’s presidential candidate. Some were even accused of conniving with the APC to secure their re-election at the expense of the presidential candidate of the party.”
“In some cases, due to Buhari’s popularity or threat from the incumbent, some PDP governors and gubernatorial candidates did not campaign for the presidential candidate because they felt that if they campaigned for Atiku, people would see them as anti-Buhari.”
This same attitude, the committee added, was witnessed in the campaign funding, as it noted that “except for two governors or so, the presidential candidate of the party was left to substantially fund the campaigns and the election.”
The committee suspected “an embargo”, and threat of punishment on corporate bodies, by the APC-led Federal Government, from contributing to the PDP presidential campaign fund.
Said the committee in its report: “…our findings further revealed that donations to the presidential campaign were nil, suggesting the possibility of an embargo on such donations.
“Top executives, corporate bodies and philanthropists were said to have responded to funds solicitations more by their silence than any effective action.
“We are therefore left to wonder the possibility,… that there was a directive somewhere prohibiting such donations, at the risk of punishment for any breach.”
Within the PDP, the committee said defeated presidential aspirants sabotaged the party’s presidential campaign strategy.
“Some leaders collected materials/logistics for election but went back home. Some even used their premises for the opposition,” it noted, adding that there was no financial support for the campaign committees by the aspirants.”
It added: “As the statistics clearly show, the strongholds of the PDP especially in the South East and South-South have been eroded demographically in terms of voter registration.
“Thus, even with over 75 per cent of the votes in each of them, so long as the ruling party continues to control the North West, North East and South West, it will have numerical superiority over the PDP and therefore a clear electoral advantage.
“These statistics paint a simple picture: the PDP cannot rely on its regional votes alone to reclaim the presidency,” the committee warned.
Though it admitted that the PDP candidate had higher electoral value than President Muhammadu Buhari, who was candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), due to the latter’s poor performance in office since 2015, the committee blamed PDP’s loss on plethora of factors.
It listed poor funding, anti-party activities, lack of proper campaign coordination, the connivance of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and security agencies to rig for the ruling party, as well as unbalanced media coverage, as some of the militating factors.
Said the report: “The PDP Presidential Election Campaign in 2019, failed to effectively use the failure of the APC government to gain more votes.
“Between 2015 and 2019, Buhari was demystified in the eyes of many Nigerians. The presidential campaign and the party took many things for granted. Some members alleged that the party caused itself the election by failing to adequately plan and implement an effective campaign strategy.
“Others cited example of inability of the presidential candidate to remain in the country after winning the primary election and the sudden change in the leadership of his campaign team, as contributory factors.”
“In 2019, this led to the misappropriation of resources meant to be working towards victory in the election.
The committee also faulted the composition of the presidential campaign organisation, which it noted, reflected “names of people who were either alien to the usual running of the party/elections or those known to have shown apathy to the party, and those who had recently been received back to the party. This leaves genuine members demotivated.”
This problem was further compounded by the failure of his campaign organisation to carry key party stakeholders along, campaign resources not effectively utilised or transparently distributed, major decisions taken without consultations while private campaign groups were given precedence over the party structures.
The committee expressed surprise at “the humongous and unbelievable figures” INEC allotted to the APC in Yobe and Borno States “where voters had been chased away by Boko Haram insurgents.
“That of Yobe was particularly obvious because even the governor could not vote in Geidam, his home town.
“When placed against INEC’s returns for the south, an area where voting was substantially peaceful and uninterrupted, the returns for the crisis-torn northern states of Yobe and Borno displayed the most grotesque electoral fraud in Nigeria and paint an incontrovertible picture of some of the demographic acrobatics that foreclose the reliability of statistical data for the nation’s development.”
It also accused INEC of “dubious constituency delineation, under registration of voters in PDP controlled states, delay in sending electoral materials to PDP strongholds, over registrations of voters in APC controlled states and conduct of elections in deserted, war-torn APC strongholds to create opportunity for fraudulent voting.”
On the part of security agencies, the PDP review committee said some security agents did not disguise their partisanship, which was manifested in unlawful arrest and intimidation of PDP members and officials on election day, outright frustration of voting in PDP strongholds, provision of security cover to vote manipulation, as well as denial of PDP agents and civil society organisations (CSOs) members access to collation and voting centres.
