The director general (DG) Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Council of the Labour Party Balogun Akin Osuntokun has taken a swipe at the Presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu for saying that the Naira redesign policy and fuel scarcity that has made life difficult for Nigerians, were targeted at him.
He described the alarm he raised as a self admittance that he had sinister motive to actually deploy money to buy votes.
Tinubu, on January 25th, 2023 in a jab directed at the Federal Government, alleged plot by some ‘powers-that-be’ to sabotage his chances at the polls through the fuel scarcity and naira redesign policy.
Tinubu had made the statement in Abeokuta where he went for his presidential campaign for the second time.
Osuntokun who was responding to a poser on whether he believes the 2023 election would be free and fair explained that,
“So you now ask yourself, what is the implication and meaning of what he is saying. For him to personally appropriate it. It means he is aware, he was going to use it. He had the intention to manipulate the election with money.
“As I said before, what he said was anticipated by the President, the leader of his own Party, when he said that the policy was really and to a large percentage made to target anybody he thinks will use stolen money to purchase votes or intimidate voters with such, that was what President Buhari said.
“You can relate those two statements and see how they correspond with one another.”
He said, they have hope than expectation
“You can only hope, but in reality at times, we have more reasons to be apprehensive whether it will come out free and fair. We wait to see.
He expressed the concern that election officials, who are mostly youths would be pre-cluded from voting, disenfranchised.
“If you compute the election officials from all over the place, those that fall into that category, would run into million. How does INEC propose such thing. They will not be able to vote?
He said most of them are, interested in voting because they fall into the demographic that own our own campaign.
“That is the younger generation.
Indirectly, we are going to be deprived of thousands if not millions of vote in the party.”