The senatorial candidate of the Africa Democratic Congress in Ebonyi State in the 2027 election, Dr Silas Onu, says President Bola Tinubu has no path to winning the 2027 presidential election, citing how opposition coalition will frustrate rigging of the polls.
Onu, who spoke in Enugu, said the planned coalition “doesn’t mean one party will give up their position for another”. He said no candidate would step down for another.
In his words, “We must know that this government really has no other pathway to victory unless they hijack or steal such victory. So opposition parties must work as one to make them stand against such an agenda or plan to hijack the system. When you hear alliance of coming together of opposition parties, it is for the purposes of securing the votes. Everything happens at the polling units. Forget about all these stories where you hear people boasting that they have already won and so on. It is the people who will decide those they will vote for.”
He said rigging is done at polling units, noting that the coalition’s watchword is to defend the votes. “It will happen at the polling units. Thank God for Section 63, Sub-section 3 that has mandated the upload of results on the irev, and recognises those results as valid, and can be enforced in the court. Without that Section, I doubt if Gov Ademola Adeleke of Osun State would have won his election recently. What happened was that when they announced results and uploaded on the irev, his nephew Davido had his own situation room. He was just downloading and computing the results. Before INEC declared the result, they already had theirs. That is why the recent debate is whether people can announce results of elections. Of course, the law allows one to announce results but it is not in one’s place to declare a winner. But you can announce the result as it is. We don’t know why some people are against announcing results. No law says people cannot announce results. All party agents coming as one is the alliance. It is all for one, and one for all at polling units.”
He maintained that the resolution of opposition agents is to insist that “if Candidate A scores one, you must record that one for him, and if Candidate B scores 100, you must give him that 100”.
He revealed that, “What usually happens in the past is that you find desperate political parties undermining other party agents so they will collaborate with them to steal votes, and they write results, and these agents will sign off on such results as that was what happened at the polling units, or the agents would turn a blind eye to results not to be uploaded immediately until they go and tamper with them, and then upload them subsequently. We don’t want that.”
