The Initiator of the Lagos4Lagos Movement, Mr. Abdul-Azeez Olajide Adediran, popularly known as Jandor, has spoken of the importance of the registration/validation exercise embarked upon by his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) reports The Gazelle News.com.
According to him, the exercise will not only afford the party to know its genuine members but will also prevent what he called ‘intra-party rigging’.
Jandor spoke at a media parley with editors in Lagos on Thursday, 28 January, 2021 at the Liberty House, Ikeja, state secretariat of his group.
Explaining the concept of intra party ‘rigging’, Jandor maintained that in the past, registration forms are given to some leaders who will register mostly fictitious names as opposed to the present exercise that entails the physical presence of members across the 20 local government areas of the state.
“Most of the party membership register you see in Lagos is manipulated. What you have on most of the registers are fictitious names that will enable the leader to impose any candidate of his choice. And you dare not challenge him because they hold the ace.
“For instance, how do you explain what happened in Lagos in 2019 general elections? During the primaries, our presidential candidate, Muhammadu Buhari scored 1.9 million votes and our gubernatorial candidate, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu scored 970,000 votes. If you add it with Governor Akinwumi Ambode’s 72,000 , it’s over one million votes, but during the election Governor Sanwo-Olu who scored 970, 000 during primaries managed to get 739,000 votes. Where are the leftovers of over one million votes put together during primaries? What did President Buhari score? It’s far cry from the 1.9 million votes we declared for him during the primaries. Are we now saying that our party members didn’t vote for us? And here we are talking of general election that involves everyone,” he said.
Speaking on the preparation of his group for the exercise, Jandor said the group had inaugurated an 852-member committee across the 20 local governments and 245 political wards for proper monitoring of the exercise.
“We’ve also toured all the 20 local governments to sensitise our members on the need to not only register but also to monitor the exercise.
“Since the registration and revalidation exercise is going to be done physically at the polling units, we’ve put in place at least one of our members to man each polling unit,” he said.
“The most important for Lagos4Lagos is to take back Lagos and returns it to the Lagosians,” he added.
