Follow @9jaLife A former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Chief Olabode George, speaks on some national issues, in this interview with newsmen in Lagos. BOLA BADMUS brings these excerpts: As a leader, how prepared is your party for the battle in Lagos State for the days ahead? After leaving the vice-chairmanship seat of the party at the centre, I am still a strong leader and a committed one for the party; I would tell you what I know. We have tested our hands in one or two elections. In the past, we used to boycott illegality because of the issue surrounding LCDAs or whatever you called them, and we said we would not take that. So this time around, somebody advised that why don't you do a reversal? We were asked to go ahead and try and we did just that by participating in the local government election. And that was when we were assured that all the procedures were supposed to be like INEC procedure; that was when accepted whatever they called it in Lagos State. And we collected results from the collation centres and by law, we knew the returning officer in each particular location was to announce the results. We got the results and we won so many, many councillorship and chairmanship seats and of course, they still had the higher number than us. But the shock was when we got to the headquarters of LASIEC, they had changed the results. The chairman of the commission now said the ACN (Action Congress of Nigeria) won all the seats and he said whoever was not happy could go to court. We are building up a time bomb because Nigeria is not an island. Look at the elections done in Ghana, next door here. When are we going to be like them? We are now 14 years into democratic traffic, are we still write figures by hands? Technology has been done, so let us grow out of this. We have to be careful because there is serious consequence for anybody in government to rough ride people he governs. It is not you writing the result, the process should be thorough; [...]
