It seems APC has just shot itself in the foot by choosing to tread on a path that even INEC, with all its boldness, would not dare to walk.
Too much of everything, they say, is bad. In the coming days, APC may have set itself up for endless litigation that could distract the party badly ahead of 2027, all because of excessive politics and unnecessary manipulation.
First, APC started by selling forms to people they already knew would never be cleared to participate in the primaries. After making huge money from the exercise, they went ahead to disqualify almost one-third of those who purchased the forms, simply because they believed they lack the locus to challenge the injustice in court.
But now, the real problem has emerged.
For almost 48 hours, APC has refused to announce the results of the Senatorial primaries conducted across the country.
Acting in line with party guidelines and its Constitution, APC had earlier constituted Electoral Committees nationwide to conduct the Senate primary elections on Monday. But shockingly, on the eve of the primaries, the party released a memo stripping those committees of the power to declare the results of the elections they were sent to conduct, unless such results were first vetted in Abuja.
And I ask, how do you empower people to conduct an election, yet deny them the authority to tell contestants who won and who lost?
Well, the Electoral Committees across the nation completed their assignments, yet APC has continued to withhold the results because what they are allegedly cooking up as “results” is still being perfected behind closed doors.
The implication of this manipulation is dangerous for the party itself. APC may have unknowingly fallen into the trap of aggrieved aspirants and handed even weak contenders a legal window to drag the party to court.
The moment those results are finally announced, even people who genuinely lost the primary elections may head straight to court, not necessarily to argue that they won, but to challenge the process used in declaring the results.
Their argument will be that APC, breached both the Electoral Act, the APC Constitution, and the party’s nomination guidelines, all of which mandates that primary election results must be declared at the venue where the election was conducted, by the Electoral Committee Chairman who supervised it. Reference can easily be made to Article 20.4 of the APC Constitution and Section 9(ii)(e) of the APC nomination guidelines.
And when these matters get to court, the focus may no longer be on who actually won or lost. The real issue will become whether APC followed its own rules and due process or not.
Sometimes, no matter how smart a system thinks it is, it cannot fool everybody all the time.
I am Ekene Aninze Esq.