The Imo State Government has called on relevant security agencies to immediately arrest the PDP candidate for the Ideato North/South Federal Constituency, Ikenga Ugochinyere over his recent claims that voters registration at Omuma electoral ward, the home ward of Governor Hope Uzodimma, was fraught with inflation of figures and filled with fictitious names.
Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Chief Declan Emelumba, in a statement he issued yesterday in Owerri to newsmen, said the action became necessary to ascertain from Ikenga Ugochinyere how he obtained the voters register he had been displaying before the public.
According to him, the claims of the CUPP boss should be thoroughly investigated as it is coming when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is still at the stage of Automated Biometric Verification of the System (ABIS).
Noting that the exercise must be concluded before any official voters register could be released to the public, Emelumba stated that Ikenga had gone further to list the names of states that entered fictitious registration of voters which never included Imo.
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The commissioner insisted that the PDP candidate either hacked INEC saver and doctored documents therefrom or forged the very document he was brandishing, stressing that the document being bandied by the PDP candidate for the 2023 elections was aimed at heating up the polity and inciting the public.
Reacting to the claim by Ugochinyere that Omuma ward had fewer than 6,000 registered voters in 2014, Chief Emelumba, relying on verified data from INEC contended that the ward had almost 10,000 voters under that period and had registered over 23,000 by 2019.
He argued that the siting of a polytechnic at Omuma, which has over 20,000 students and staff, was to throw up more eligible voters from different parts of Nigeria and residing in Omuma, saying “this will naturally shoot up the number of registered voters for 2023.”
Emelumba said the claim of Ugochinyere was spurious and laughable and aimed at rubbishing Governor Uzodimma, stressing that the plot was hatched by the PDP in the state to embarrass the state government in an attempt to diminish the commendations from the successful visit of President Muhammadu Buhari to the state.
“The allusion by Ugochinyere that the INEC office at Omuma had been burnt and that residents had fled the community because of insecurity, clearly vindicated the government’s position that PDP was behind the insecurity in Imo state for political gains.
“From the foregoing, it should be clear to all and sundry that Ugochinyere antics were diversionary meant to perfect the fraudulent activity of PDD, and to divert attention from their evil plots against the 2023 elections,” he submitted.
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