The United States, along other western powers are deploying spy satellites to monitor next month’s presidential election, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, said yesterday, as he cautioned President Muhammadu Buhari and All Progressives Congress, APC, against any rigging plans.

Responding to the administration’s rebuff of the caution by the western powers against last weekend’s suspension of Justice Walter Onnoghen as Chief Justice of Nigeria, the PDP flag-bearer, while cautioning against any plans to rig the elections, urged Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, military, police and other security agencies not to give in to the entreaties of the APC to manipulate the election.

Atiku in the statement in Abuja, yesterday, by his Special Assistant on Public Communication, Mr. Phrank Shaibu, said: “Buhari’s cabal is unhappy with the statements from the US, the British and the EU because they know that these world powers have agreed to re-route their latest and most technologically sophisticated spy sattelites, including NAOL-47 satellite to provide comprehensive coverage over Nigeria on February 16. The photographs these satellites will deliver cannot only show someone reading a newspaper but also which newspaper they are reading.”

“The truth is that, there is no country in the world where a president with this appalling record could ever be re-elected. Over 100 million Nigerians cannot afford even one decent meal a day, yet their president is seeking re-election. The world powers as well as Nigerians also have intelligence that Buhari will decisively lose the election since the people are angry because they are hungry and have no jobs.

“There is no level of rigging that this vile government could ever do to overturn the millions of Nigerians who will turn up at the polls to vote him out. We ask our dearest young population who got a job under Buhari in the last four years, to vote for Buhari.

“But all those who lost their jobs and whose relations lost their jobs and businesses to his maladministration to please come out in large numbers to elect Atiku Abubabar who is a harbinger of job creation.”

•Sourced from a Vanguard report

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