As published by Nigerian Tribune and other mainstream media, the political parties the Kwara State Independent Electoral Commission (KWSIEC) said would participate in the September 21 local government elections are five and they include the Accord Party (AP) Allied Peoples Movement (APM) Social Democratic Party (SDP) Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC). However, among these parties, it is only the PDP that has been crying wolf.
Before KWSIEC announced September 21 as the date of the forthcoming polls, we knew how some elements in the PDP called the Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq-led administration names saying the Governor didn’t want to conduct the LG election. They weren’t alone in this name-calling — one unregistered political party and self-styled CSO also donated its deserted Facebook page to attack him and his government.
Kwara LG polls are a few weeks away and PDP is doing everything possible to ensure the election does not hold. Mr Bukola Saraki and his sidekicks after their failed attempts to get the electoral commission to do their bidding as usual have resorted to plotting against it won’t succeed in conducting the polls which many observers have said would end in tears for the PDP. A few weeks ago, they dragged KWSIEC to the court and asked the court to prevent INEC from releasing crucial electoral materials for the election to the commission and today they are complaining about the pace of its preparation.
While some people may not know why Saraki and his followers don’t want the election to be held next month, analysts have said that there is no reason other than the fact they have studied the mood of the electorates and found that the polls aren’t going to favour their party’s candidates. In other words, they have seen that their unpopular candidates from bottom to top will lose the polls.
Analysts have said the PDP’s imminent defeat in the next month’s polls is connected to ex-governor Abdulfatah Ahmed and Saraki administrations’ maladministration, noting that it is the ghost of their fraudulent and wasteful governments that is haunting the PDP. Seconded by the latter’s tenure, the former’s administration is the worst Kwara has witnessed since the return of democracy in 1999. He strangulated civil servants’ promotions, owed workers salaries, and diverted UBEB counterpart funds. Kwara’s roads and schools were in terrible conditions throughout his inglorious administration.
For Saraki and his party to think they could stop KWSIEC from conducting local government polls next month, they must be joking. Their recent moves can’t shake the commission neither can they be a clog in the wheel of the forthcoming polls. KWSIEC is determined and ready to conduct a free and fair election as it promised. Neither Saraki nor his deluded followers could teach or educate it on how to prepare for an election it had been conducting before dropping his medical profession for Saraki’s dirty politics.
It was last week or so, that I stumbled upon a post where the writer, a Kwaran tried to advise Saraki and his followers to channel the energy they are wasting trying to stop KWSIEC from conducting the forthcoming LG polls into healing their hailing party, the PDP maybe it would win at least one seat in the state house of assembly in 2027 general elections. However, several of the comments I found under the post could be better summarised as ‘PDP in Kwara? Never again!’
Abdulsalam, a public affairs analyst, writes from Ilorin.
