Speaking during a press conference in Abuja yesterday, the chairman of the party, Dr Victor Ikechukwu, claimed that there was an orchestrated plan to sabotage its efforts to contribute to building an egalitarian society in which generations unborn will live in peace and tranquillity.
His words: “The first key national issues we want to address is about the election tribunal. Some of the outcomes of the judgments from the tribunals have not been too pleasant. It is not in our character to question the integrity of the judiciary.
“The judiciary is doing its best to ensure that it discharges its statutory responsibilities as fairly as it can, but the present development has put a question mark on that.
“In Abia State for instance, where it was very glaring from day one that APGA won almost all the elections in that state, our candidate was shortchanged but we decided not to take the laws into our hands as law-abiding citizens of this country. We put the national interest above our own parochial interest. “We sort relief in court, we went to the tribunal believing that we will get justice from the tribunal but what we got was far from what expected. This has aroused some sense of uncertainty around us that we are pushed to begin to question the rationality and propriety of some of the judgments that have been delivered.
“It was the same situation in Anambra State where after going through some of the judgments, I was ashamed to be a part of the system. We have to build a nation devoid of unnecessary partisanship and parochialism. They gave flimsy excuses for dismissing cases they knew quite well went through the whole hug of legal scrutiny but at the end, they threw it into the abyss.
“We know that there are technicalities but the Appeal court said that the tribunals also should not base their judgments on technicalities. In one of the cases that went through a 174-day scrutiny, but the judgment read said that the case was dismissed for lack of merit yet they allowed the case to run for that long.
“I found out that there are injustice inside injustice. Our party consists of men and women of integrity. We love this country and that is why we are working very hard to build an egalitarian society in which generations of the born will leave in peace and tranquillity.
“We will sit back and watch some people turn our vision of contributing to national development. Time has come for this country to rejig and see how we can review the laws to make them more human and attuned to our societal needs.
“We don’t want a situation that can hold people hostage and excoriate to people who come to seek justice. We are really worried and something must be urgently done to drastically review the electoral act 2010 as amended.
“The provisions of that law is too draconian, inhuman and uncivilized to be used to judge people in the modern society. We call a drastic review of that law to make it more amenable to our environmental needs.
“We can no longer sit down and watch the unnecessary chastisement of our members across the country. We are going to seek any redress statutorily permissible to reclaim our mandates,” he said.
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