By Amb. Tony Okonigene
That the PDP National Working Committee threw away the adhoc delegates lists submitted by Governor Godwin Obaseki through his cohorts came as no surprise to political pundits. Anyone who is abreast with the provisions of the Electoral Act and the PDP constitution as they affect the conduct of party congresses would have been amused with the grandstanding put up by the governor and his escorts.
The lists were bound for the dustbin for obvious reasons.
The Electoral Act specifically gives INEC the authority to monitor the congresses of political parties. To this end, INEC normally requires the parties to submit certain items before any congress or primary. Two items standout;
1. Copies of ward registers showing the names of registered members in each ward
2. The lists of the returning officers of each ward and LGA.
These are crucial items amongst others.
The results from each ward must be endorsed by the accredited returning officers of each ward and counter signed by the INEC monitors while that of the LGAs must be signed by the returning officers and the INEC EOs. INEC will then transmit the results from the LGAs straight to its headquarters in Abuja before the parties take the hard copies to the state levels and onwards to Abuja.
At this stage, the results from all the LGAs are already registered on INEC’s server. When the results get to Abuja, they must tally with what INEC has on their server. Gone are the days when results were taken manually to Abuja by INEC and thereby manipulated on the way before getting to Abuja.
If there is any discrepancy in any of the results on INEC server, the result cannot be used for any primary. Any attempt to do so will lead to an automatic disqualification of candidates that will emerge from such primaries by a court of law.
The delegates lists compiled and submitted to the PDP National headquarters by Governor Godwin Obaseki failed the above litmus tests. In the first place, the names sent are not in the wards registers of the party. That means technically, the proposed delegates are strangers and not members of the PDP.
Secondly, the lists were not signed by the accredited returning officers of the party and INEC monitors at the ward levels nor at the LGAs. The lists were not transmitted from the LGAs as required by INEC. They just sat in government house in Benin to compile the lists, gave money to the state returning officers from Abuja who happily took the money and ran back to Abuja with the lists without waiting for the results from the LGAs.
It is obvious that Governor Godwin Obaseki’s insistence that the PDP recognized the lists he smuggled to Abuja is borne out of ego and not in the overall interest of the party. How can you be pressing to use delegates lists that will surely lead to the disqualification of the candidates of the party just because you want to message your overblown ego?
The National Working Committee of the PDP cannot be blackmailed into accepting such illegality. The threat of going to Labour Party if the governor’s lists are not accepted cannot work. The provisions of the Electoral Act and the PDP constitution are supreme.
The problem the governor and his escorts have is the fact that they are yet to come to terms with the fact that The PDP is not APC where anything goes. This was what they did with the APC National chairman then, Adams Oshiomole that led to to disqualification of several of their candidates. This cannot be allowed to repeat itself in Edo State PDP.
Here in the PDP, if you show that you have enough money to waste, they will help you to waste the money but at the end of the day, they will do the right thing and follow the provisions of the law.