By CHARLES IWUOHA

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senatorial candidate in the February 3, 2024 bye-election for Ebonyi South Zone, Barrister Silas Onu, has alleged that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was frustrating his moves and process of filing his petition against the said winner of the poll, Professor Anthony Ani of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in court.

This was as he further claimed the normal charge of N10 for a page of Certified True Copy, has been hiked and pegged at N300 for his sake, just to dissuade him from filing the appeal.

Onu, stated this while addressing newsmen in Abakiliki, the Ebonyi State capital on Thursday.

According to him, “After INEC in Ebonyi connived to bring in same court action against me, leading to a bizarre judgment delivered two days to the election, they are now actively ensuring that we do not get the electoral materials necessary for filing our petition.

“We applied for CTC and since then, it has been one story to another. They charged N300 per page for CTC, while that amount for CTC is and has remained N10 per page. Then they sent a private account number of one Ibrahim for the payment of the N300 per page for CTC. We have refused to pay and they aren’t showing up to discharge their duty.

“We have to put this out for the public to see how INEC now have become fully and unpretentiously partisan in the discharge of their duty.

“The HoD legal and the legal officer in charge cannot be above the law and we know precisely what to do in the circumstance.”

Recall that Onu had accused the APC of ballot snatching, multiple thumb printing and vote buying during the polls,

adding he had to leave his polling unit after voting owing to provocative activities by the ruling party APC, in the presence of INEC officials.

He had said: “It is probably bye and not an election. That is what we are seeing, especially in Ohaozara local government area. There is no election. The former governor who has vowed he must win, when you hear somebody say he must win, he is using thugs, compelling people to vote. In fact, they are holding people’s hands to thumb print. When you vote for PDP, they will thumbprint for another party to invalidate it.

“Apart from that, they have been snatching ballot boxes. I do not know what they want to do with it but because the election petition tribunal or the supreme court has said BIVAS is of no use, they are now carrying ballot boxes, going to somewhere to thumbprint, not caring what accreditation figure in BIVAS will say. Of course, they will get the result sheet, write accreditation figure, write their result and move on.”

When contacted, the Head of Voter Education, Dr. Christian Elekwa, denied knowledge of the situation, but however, said he was not the right person to speak on the matter.

He referred our Correspondent to the Legal Department, on Thursday.

The Head of Legal Department, Ibrahim Obiahu, described the allegation as baseless and untrue.

He said: “It’s not true. That’s not true. Even though I shouldn’t speak on this; but it’s not true.”

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