The Nigeria Labour Congress has scheduled a meeting of its National Executive Committee for February 18, 2015 as part of on-going efforts to resolve the electoral dispute in the labour centre.
The General Secretary of the NLC, Dr. Peter Ozo-Eson, said in a statement on Friday that the Congress National Administrative Council met on Thursday and resolved to call a meeting of the NEC to deliberate on a new date for the disrupted elections of the congress in the early hours of Wednesday.
He said that the NLC was determined to cooperate with all the parties involved in the impasse to ensure that the election issue was resolved as quickly as possible to prevent the current elected officials from exceeding their stipulated tenure.
Ozo-Eson said that while the irregularity detected in the ballot papers was caused by the Credentials Committee which supervised the election, the issue was insignificant and could have been resolved through invalidation of votes.
According to him, the elections commenced on a peaceful note until some delegates spotted the irregularities involving four candidates and reacted sharply to them because of the feeling the errors might have been deliberately included in the ballots to rig the election in favour of a particular candidate.
He said, “The voting process, the last item on the agenda, commenced peacefully and in an orderly manner on Wednesday, February 11, and lasted through the night. However, on the morning of Thursday, February 12, a printing error was spotted in a few ballot papers by way of duplication of names. This error affected four candidates, two each from opposing camps.
“As regrettable as this error by the Credential Committee is, its degree was insignificant and could have been resolved amicably by way of vote invalidation. However, this was not to be as some delegates who held the view that the entire process might have been corrupted, reacted sharply. This led to the suspension of the voting process.
“The National Administrative Council of the Congress swiftly met a few hours later and resolved to convene a meeting of the National Executive Council on Wednesday, February 18, for the purpose of fixing a new date to take the vote.
“As painful as this unfortunate disruption is, we are determined to work with all those concerned and the organs and friends of Congress to find a way to resolve the impasse as quickly as possible and without the current leadership exceeding the constitutionally mandated time limit of four years.”
Meanwhile, one of the contestants for the position of the President of the NLC, the National President, Medical and Health Workers Union, Mr. Ayuba Wabba, who is also the National Treasurer of the NLC, had said that the recorded irregularities in the ballot booklets were a product of a premeditated attempt to disrupt the elections.
He said that the Credentials Committee rather than the secretariat of the NLC was constitutionally empowered to produce, and indeed produced the ballot booklets.
Wabba who addressed journalists on behalf of the ‘Redemption Group’ in Abuja on Friday said that the NLC had not used the kind of ballot booklets used by the Credential Committee in any of its previous elections.
He said that he was prepared to subject himself to transparent free and fair elections any time.
While Wabba accused NUPENG and NUEE of being behind the crisis, the General Secretary of NUEE, Joe Ajaero, also a contestant for the position of President, told journalists on Thursday that voting was stopped when irregularities that could be used to rig the election in favour of a particular candidate were detected.
BY FIDELIS SORIWEI
