The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has told the All Progressives Congress (APC) that its planned one-party government will not stand.
The party, which was reacting to a statement by the APC on Tuesday, stated that no amount of blackmail, orchestration of violence, killings and forceful seizure of electoral processes by the ruling party, would make PDP drop its call for electoral reforms.
In a statement yesterday by the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, the main opposition party noted that its proposed electoral reforms will return Nigeria to democratic practice that engenders respect to the rights of the citizens for free and fair elections.
“APC’s ultimate design is to use violence, intimidation, attacks, blackmail and threats against the PDP to frighten Nigerians and scare them from participating in electoral processes, then upset our democratic order and perpetuate a one-party despotic regime in our nation.
“This is the reason the APC is averse to our pro-people call for electoral reforms in our country,” PDP said.
It described APC’s attack as diversionary tactics to enable it sustain its ‘coup’ against democracy through the use of state apparatus and paid hoodlums to unleash brute force, arbitrary arrests and bloodletting.
PDP remarked that impunity, violations and political brigandage are not part of the tenets of democracy.
The party decried what it described as the silence of the police hierarchy to the use of police helicopter to attack voters in Kogi State as well as the failure to parade those said to have been arrested for the burning of a PDP Woman Leader, Mrs. Salome Abuh.
PDP told the APC that Nigerians have seen it plan to impose a one-party system with its attendant despotic proclivities, but said such would not stand.
“The APC should, therefore, perish the dream of imposing a one-party state as well as its distortions that the PDP will not participate in the Edo and Ondo governorship elections.
“Such ignoble script cannot succeed, as the PDP remains the cornerstone of Nigerians’ participation in the democratic order; hence our unshaken resolve to stand with the people on the insistence for electoral reforms in our country,” the party added.