The leadership crisis rocking the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) yesterday took a new twist with the Alhaji Sadiq Masalla faction accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of foul play in the recognition of its leadership.
Reacting to a publication in one of the national dailies at the weekend which purportedly carried a letter signed by INEC’s secretary, Alhaji Abdullahi Kaigama, in which Chief Victor Umeh and Alhaji Sani Shinkafi were recognised as chairman and secretary respectively, Masalla said the letter was yet to be received by its faction, and questioned the removal of some vital documents submitted to the commission before they convoked their National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting.
Masalla said that rather than submit a resolution of two-thirds membership of the National Working Committee (NWC) as claimed in the ‘private letter’ handed over to Chief Umeh last Thursday purporting to authenticate Umeh’s leadership, it was the resolution of two-thirds of the party’s NEC convening the meeting that was forwarded deceitfully to the commission.
Alhaji Masalla, who made the clarification in Abuja, in a chat with newsmen, explained that from the tone of the letter given to Umeh, it was clear that some INEC staff had compromised themselves since its NEC resolutiuon got missing from its file after the Commission had certified receipt of the original copy.
“Some people must have tampered with the documents in INEC’s possession and misrepresented the true facts. We therefore call for a thorough probe of the tendency to tamper with official documents by some of the commission’s officials and also the tendency by them to deliberately misrepresent facts,” he said.
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?Even as we speak with you gentlemen of the press, we are yet to receive the copy of the letter signed by the commission’s secretary, four clear days after it was purportedly written and four days after the said letter was handed over to Chief Umeh.
“While we await the receipt of the letter said to have been copied to us, we wish to bring to your attention that if the said letter was actually written, then the commission would have erred in its judgment since the premise for its conclusion was indeed wrong and uninformed,” Masalla said.
The factional leader explained that they had written to INEC on 22 June furnishing it of the NEC members’ resolution asking them to observe the NEC in accordance with the party’s constitution which was why INEC officials led by Mrs Regina Omo-Agege attended.
They wondered the point at the group failed to comply with the party’s constitution when as at July 16 when the NEC held, there was no issue of constitutional violation, noting that it was intriguing that shortly after, the documents they had submitted disappeared from INEC files, which prompted them to re-submit the acknowledged copies to the commission in their latest petition.
Said Masalla: “A hatchet man’s job? have been completed. One interesting thing about the letter as published was that the writer turned INEC into a prosecutor and a judge and has elected to give judgement on a matter which they equally agreed has a criminal dimension even when investigation has not been completed. This does not put the commission in a good light as an unbiased umpire in the APGA crises”.
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