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‘Why I was mad at Jega’ – Chief Godsday Orubebe

FORMER Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Chief Godsday Orubebe has explained why he disrupted the collation of results of the presidential elections at the INEC Situation Room, International Conference Centre (ICC), Abuja on Tuesday, March 31, 2015.

He spoke with Channels Television minutes after he openly accused the INEC chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega of being partial, biased and tribalistic.

It would be recalled that the former Minister and the PDP agent at the presidential poll held the chairman and INEC official hostage for minutes before proceedings at the situation room continued.

He said, “When a political party wrote a petition, raising issues about a state, you set up a committee to go to the state and investigate it.  What is the difficulty in setting up a committee to look at the issues we have raised?

“Remember he was not prepared to even answer it until I said you must answer.  And it shouldn’t have come to that level.  That’s the point we are making.  If he gives any room for people to doubt what he’s doing, then it would be difficult for people to accept what he is doing.  That’s our point.

“He must provide a level playing ground for all the parties.  If he attends to Mr. A, he should be able to attend to Mr. B.  It is as simple as that.  It is unfortunate that Jega would allow things to get to this point.  I am a party agent.  I will go back and report to them.  They would be able to make a statement.”

“The simple truth is this we expect that things could have been in a better way.  We went to his office to swiftly register our protest, nobody was ready to take it from us.  We were frustrated.  We were forced to come here to see him.  We came to express our concern.  And if we didn’t do it this way, nobody would have heard us.  We had issues in four states including Kaduna where the Vice President comes from.  In Kano, young children were thumb printing and voting; we raised that point.  Jigawa also has a problem.  All these things are there, but Jega just closed his eyes.  And that’s our problem.

“We went to their secretariat but they were not ready to take it from us.  That was why he was approached.  The Rivers case he attended to was only sent through e-mail.  And he hurried to go to Rivers.  Here we are talking about four states.  Our concern is he should not raise issue for people to doubt what he is doing.  We are already circumspect of what he is doing.   The earlier he calls himself to order or else it’s not going to be fine with all of us.”

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