Candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, has refused to vote in the on-going Anambra State governorship election, insisting that other voters who arrived the polling unit before him must first vote before he could also do so.
He made this clear while speaking with newsmen around 4:00 p.m. today, Saturday, November 6, 2021, lamenting that his people were being systematically disenfranchised. He raised the alarm that only about 20 out of the about 800 registered voters who turned up at his polling unit in Isuofia had been able to cast their vote while the rest were yet to be accredited due to the non-working of the Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine.
Soludo said: “I’ve been here since morning. I’ve been here since 11:30. I will not vote until others have voted. I refuse to jump the queue but I must cast my vote.”
He lamented that the same situation prevailed in his Isuofia stronghold, saying: “The entire Isuofia, it just hasn’t worked.”
Soludo noted that, curiously, the process has worked perfectly in the Uga stronghold of one of his main rivals, Senator Andy Uba of the federal-ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
He observed that “even if you put electricity here, at the rate the machine is going at the rate of one per hour, I don’t think they will finish by tomorrow.”
Some of the prospective voters at the polling unit also lamented their ordeal. One of them said: “I have been here since 6:45 in the morning. The worst part of it is that we don’t know what to do. INEC officials have not come to address us. My mom is almost 90. She has been here since morning but cannot cast her vote.”
