Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, a former Minority Leader in the Senate, has alleged that some elements in the democratic setup deliberately manipulated the just-concluded presidential results to sway victory for their favoured candidate, blaming it on the so-called glitches.

Speaking in Umuahia on Wednesday, Abaribe maintained that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was either switched off or that the wrong code was given by some anti-democratic elements as the election was ongoing.

He explained that the Senate enacted a beautiful law that ought to be fraud-proof in terms of putting in place a technology-based system whose aim is to give the people their choice candidates as winners, but regretted that in their good intentions of giving the country the best, the lawmakers did not consider that some evil forces would compromise the system.

“We trusted INEC to do the job. We had the best intentions in making the law, but we didn’t consider the fact that INEC will behave the way it did. Somebody deliberately switched off the system for the presidential election, leaving the Senate and House of Reps. INEC says it doesn’t know what happened, that it was a glitch, but they declared the wrong results. Surprisingly, nobody has been arrested till and punished today,” he lamented.

On the new governor of Abia State, Senator Abaribe warned him to beware of sycophants that may surround his administration, pointing out sycophants were the ones who initiated the quarrel between him and his former boss, Orji Uzor Kalu when he (Kalu) was governor and Abaribe as his deputy from 1999 to 2001.

“My problem with Kalu started the day we were sworn in as Governor and Deputy Governor respectively. The outgoing Military Administrator, Col Anthony Obi had given me an official convoy as the deputy governor. After the swearing-in, I came down with my wife to board my official vehicle, but didn’t see it. I was stranded.

“Somebody had instructed that the vehicle be taken to Government House. I had to board a vehicle provided by one of my relations to Government House. When I found out what happened, I confronted Kalu over it and he said he really didn’t know that the convoy belonged to me. That he thought it was for his wife.

“Of course, sycophants went to work, asking the governor who was actually in charge, whether it was him or me. Another incident was when we attended an event with him. He made some grammatical errors and when it was my time to speak, I didn’t make any. They told him all sorts of things about me and my education,” he revealed.

He, therefore, advised Otti to expand the cities of Aba and Umuahia to decongest them, even as he lauded the governor for so far clearing the huge debris that literarily took over the two cities before now in the recent past. (Daily Independent, excluding headline)

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