BY FARUK ADEJOH-AUDU
In yet another primitive display of brute force and abuse of constitutional power, the Governor of Kogi State, Mr Yahaya Bello on Wednesday deployed his agents to the state Secretariat of the Peoples Democratic Party ( PDP) to extort the sum of N35.7 million from its contestants or they would not be allowed to display posters or billboards or campaign in the public space.
Furthermore, the agents are demanding that the party furnishes them with the Tax Clearance Certificates of all the PDP Candidates in the National and State Assembly Elections to scrutinise as claiming they suspect the tax certificates of our candidates are fake!
For a start, Bello’s agents claim they derive their powers to prevent PDP Candidates from campaigning or displaying posters and billboards from an unknown signage law dated 2022 which they claimed was passed by the all APC House of Assembly this year. We are confident that no such law was passed in the Chambers of the house except it was hurriedly written in Government House days ago and given to the speaker and clerk of the puppet legislature to sign for the purposes of targeting and clamping down on the PDP.
Since his assumption of office in 2016 the APC Government constituted a squad of violent urchins that stalk the state tearing and defacing posters and bill boards of candidates of other parties. In 2019 only APC posters and billboards were visible across the state as the urchins attack persons pasting posters or mounting billboards.
Secondly, the state Secretariat of the party is not the custodian of nomination forms but the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) thus, it is curious that they are threatening the party to produce the forms of all its Candidates for them to scrutinise the tax certificates.
This latest act of intimidation in the guise of signages and tax clearance follows a familiar pattern of sustained persecution by Bello against the PDP in Kogi State during election periods. From our experience, these antics will ultimately culminate in the cold-blooded killings of our supporters and party members.
In the last two weeks, the Bello proxies had attempted to forcefully evict the party from its Secretariat in Okene. On the heels of this harassment was the abduction a new decampee from the APC, Ibrahim Fari Shafiu by compromised security agents working for Bello. They claimed to have recovered explosives from the house of the decampee and labelled him a terrorist recruited by the PDP.
But the said Ibrahim an ally of Bello before he decamped, by their own admission in a now viral video released by the Chief of Staff to the Governor, Mr Abdulkareem Asuku was freed from prison and given lots of money to work for Bello before he defected to the PDP.
Two days before Shafiu’s abduction, our party had cried out to the security agencies of plans by Bello to use his agents to plant explosives in the houses of party stalwarts and frame them up for arrest but the alarm was ignored. Rather, the security agencies were complicit in the operation to frame Shafiu which had been infamously and erroneously misrepresented as American military clamping down on a terrorist in Trademore Estate, Lugbe-Abuja.
But we are familiar with Bello’s despicable repressive tactics. In the build up to the 2019 Kogi Governorship By-Election, a retired Assistant Commissioner of Police and Head of PDP Elections Security Committee in Dekina Local Government Area, Mr Eje Abutu; dreaded by Bello’s thugs, had guns dumped in his house by his abductors.
Some of the abductors were dressed in military camouflage while others wore mufti and bullet armoured vests. They dragged him from the bed where he was sleeping with his little son. In what would qualify for a horror movie, the toddler watched while they beat and brutalised his father before forcing him to pose for photographs with the firearms and then abducting him.
The Kogi State Police Command denied knowledge of the incident and claimed he was not in their custody. Mr Abutu luckily escaped assassination because some police personnel who knew him previously as their superior leaked his whereabouts and warned that unless his family raised alarm, he was going to be quietly eliminated. That was how the former Assistant Commissioner of Police was saved from a cruel faith.
But he was held in detention until the election was over.
The Okene Local Government Council Chairman of the Party, Alhaji Musa Adelabu wasn’t that lucky. He was abducted from his home by unknown armed men dressed in military camouflage in early August 2019 some three months to the By-Election.
More than three years later Adelabu has not been found despite repeated outcry and appeal by the party. We dread you think of the fate that must have been visited on him.
The election itself became the bloodiest in the history of democracy in Kogi State with thugs killing people across the state while a police helicopter was shooting at voters from the air.
Even after the elections, the Women Leader of Ochadamu ward, Mrs Salome Audu was forcefully barricaded in her house by APC thugs and roasted alive. Our supporters were killed in several Local Government Areas.
We have gone to this length to show Mr Bello’s modus operandi and his appetite for unprovoked violence during electioneering seasons.
These flurry of threats and harrying in the last two weeks are signs we recognize as precursors to full scale violence and bloodbath of our members and supporters.
We do not say this lightly. Bello is recorded on video threatening to personally kill and maim anyone who attempts to prevent him from winning the upcoming elections.
Again, we cry out to the world and the security institutions to dismantle Mr Bello’s infrastructure or violence and liberate the people of Kogi State to freely exercise their constitutionally guaranteed democratic right to participate in elections without fear or harm.
We call on all men of good conscience to add their voice to arresting the situation in Kogi State where the rule of force has clearly undermined free choice.
… Adejoh-Audu is the spokesman of the Kogi State PDP Presidential Election Management Committee
