• Ize-Iyamu: If We ConCede

impunity comes into play. If a ruling party of the President can lose elections, it means our country is in the right track. We are therefore appealing to President Muhammadu Buhari to take a cue from former President Goodluck Jonathan, who obviously did not interfere with the running of the independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). If he had done so, the election results that produced Buhari would have been different. Professor Attahiru Jega, the former INEC Chairman, has retired now. And he has never one day accused Jonathan of interfering with his duties. It is our hope that Buhari and members of APC, who had complained in the past about how election results were manipulated, will see it as a fundamental duty – that during their own time, the process becomes more credible. We should not see corruption only in term of stealing public funds; even those who steal in private sectors are also guilty of corruption. When you also corrupt a process, a man wins an election and you write a different results, that is also a corrupt practice. If we want to sanitise our system, we must take corruption away from our electoral system and ensure we have elections that are truly credible. We must allow the people’s votes to really count; let’s monitor spending during elections period; the idea of inducing voters on the Election Day should not be tolerated. On the side of the PDP, we are engaging the process democratically. I get amused these days when I hear that the National Publicity Secretary of PDP, Mr. Olisa Metuh, is unduly harsh on the APC and President Buhari. That is not true; we have accorded the President the respect his office deserves contrary to the ways and manner the APC treated former President Jonathan – there was no name they did not call him when he was in office.

In Edo State the governorship election will take place next year. How prepared is your party?

The PDP has been able to rebrand itself in Edo State. There is no doubt that PDP is now a very popular party in the state. Contrary to most expectation, the former President Jonathan won in Edo State during the last general election and nobody can question the credibility of the result; it was highly contested and the PDP had 58 percent of the votes; we won two senatorial seats out of three; we won five seats in the House of Representatives out of nine. The one we did not do well was that of the House of Assembly, and it was a fall-out of the presidential election. We have been able to expose the lapses of the APC in the state and they have not been able to dispute our facts. We went as far as publishing signed cheques of reckless expenditures in Edo State. And until today we have not seen any constructive reply to our exposure -- apart from names calling. And it laughable when the APC-led government in the state keep on referring to what happened in 1999, about 10 to 15 years ago. Why were they elected into government? They were elected because they promised to change what happened in the past. I thought the APC will stand on what they have been able to achieve. But they are going back to the past and talking about why they were not able to change things. They told the people of Edo State seven years ago that it was goodbye to poverty, but the poverty in the state is even worse now. They told us the state would not see flood again, but seven years later – just a year remaining, we are worse for it. Meanwhile, the state