Mr. Peter Obi and his running mate, Senator Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed
Blowing the whistle on the underhand subterfuge to subvert the will of the people from being expressed in the upcoming 2023 elections, the Nasarawa State Governor, Abdullahi Sule and the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration at the federal and state levels are alleged to have tried to armtwist the flag-off of the Labour Party’s ObiDatti Presidential Campaign in Lafia, the state capital.
According to Dr. Doyin Okupe, the Director-General of the Labour Party Campaign Council, “the Nasarawa State government did everything it could to frustrate the Labour Party’s Presidential Campaign flag off, including declaring a curfew throughout the state on the eve of the rally and restricting all movement till 10:00 AM on Saturday, the day of the programme”.
Okupe, a former presidential spokesman, speaking in a video that has gone viral, he said that the Sule government, from out of the blues, announced that there would be a state-wide sanitation exercise, the excuse for the curfew.
Okupe noted that there had not been a sanitation exercise in the state in the last seven years of the Sule administration, but to frustrate the Presidential campaign flag off, the state government declared one and enforced it to the point of declaring a curfew and enforcing restriction of movement.
This, he said, made it difficult for many of the supporters of the party from outside the state capital to attend the rally which, nonetheless, witnessed a massive attendance by mostly people living in the state capital and its environs.
Okupe, a medical doctor turned political strategist, also narrated how the state government refused to grant permit for the party to use any of the four venues the Labour Party had indicated interest in using, until on the eve of the event, when some eminent royal personalities in the state intervened and helped the party to secure the use of a field in Lafia where the rally eventually held.
According to him, the government made itself unavailable to issue the permit, frustrating the advance party sent for the rally from doing their work till the last few hours before the commencement of the rally.
Besides, Okupe also pointed out that the party was not able to get the final permit for the landing of the helicopters that brought Peter Obi, the presidential candidate and his running mate, Datti-Ahmed till the Saturday morning of the rally, as the authorities responsible also frustrated the process of securing the permits.
The state government was apparently rattled by the massive turnout during an earlier Labour Party sensitization rally in Lafia and the continuing upsurge in the number of support groups canvassing support for the Obi/Datti ticket and growing number of the party’s supporters in the state and across the country, a political analyst said, stressing that President Muhammadu Buhari who has severally pledged to ensure free and fair elections and a level playing field for all parties, and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which has also been giving similar assurances must begin from this level of campaigns to ensure that such antics deployed by the Sule administration and the aviation agencies against the Labour Party are not allowed to be repeated elsewhere by any state governments or agencies of government.
There must be level playing field for all candidates and parties everywhere in the country, the commentator said, insisting that underhand tactics are the handiwork of unpopular politicians who are unsure that they can win elections in their states if the opposition is allowed a level playing field.
“If they are popular, why are they employing these dirty, underhand tricks?” he queried, stressing that the people themselves must begin to resist such negative strategies in future,” he said.
He insisted that aviation authorities, though controlled presently by the APC federal government must be apolitical, as must the security agencies and Electoral Commission, otherwise, they all, by subverting the popular will of the people through any acts that would disadvantage other parties or candidates, could be calling for a popular uprising of the masses.
