President Muhammadu Buhari is committed to violence-free polls, National
Chairman of the All Progressive Congress, APC, Chief Odiegie Oyegun as
said.
Chief Odigie-Oyegun said this while fielding questions from journalists
shortly after inaugurating the APC election committee for the Rivers State
legislative re-run elections.
He said, “I discussed the Ondo election with the President endlessly and I
know what his complaints are; I know what his worries are.
“The President’s concern is that we must get to a stage that we must avoid
bloodshed from elections. So, for us, he insists on free and fair
primaries and elections.
“He believes that once the process is open, once it is in the public and
everybody knows it, there would be no need to degenerate into controversy
and violence after the primaries. And by the same token, he insists that
elections must be violence free. So, when we deploy heavy security
presence, there is only one objective and that is to ensure that the
voting public is free of intimidation. They can go out and vote their
conscience.
“Unlike in the past, no security man is instructed to help anybody. They
are just to make sure election is violence-free so that people have a
reasonable participation, and thank God, in the two, three elections now,
the President has succeeded in ensuring that no life was lost at the
polling unit.
“These are part of the democratic ethics of change that the President is
determined to address such that by the time the general election comes,
the voting public would be used to voting peacefully and the people’s will
would prevail.”