Marwa, Modibbo mobilise supporters for PDP
Barely a week af­ter the Peoples D e m o c r a t i c Party (PDP) conducted a primary election to choose its flagbearer for the Oc­tober 11 governorship by-election in Adamawa State, there are indica­tions that supporters of some prominent aspi­rants are already con­templating protest votes to register their displea­sure over what they term “the technical manipula­tion of the process.”
The September 6 primary election had produced acting Governor Umoru Fintiri as the PDP flagbearer. Though other major contenders for the ticket like former Lagos State military administrator, Gen. Buba Marwa and ex-Ex­ecutive Secretary of UBEC, Dr Mohammed Modibbo had accepted the outcome, some of their supporters, who are PDP leaders in various lo­cal government areas of the state, are contending that the primary election was fraught with manipulations in favour of Fintiri.
Worried that the com­plaints may cost PDP victory, Saturday Sun gathered that Marwa and Modibbo had already stepped in to pacify the aggrieved leaders to save the party from losing the state to the opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).
One of the PDP chieftains from Adamawa south senato­rial zone expressed anger that “we were brazenly denied our right to choose our best by some powerful political interests who manipulated the PDP structure in the state and deployed extra-ordinary funds to corrupt the process.”
According to the party chieftain, who is a Senatorial aspirant for the zone, “the first indication emerged two days to the primary election when the party chairman, Joel Ma­daki called members of the state party executives and all the local government chair­men to a meeting at the secre­tariat where he asked them to instruct their delegates to vote for Fintiri based on a direc­tive from the party’s National Headquarters in Abuja.
“Beyond that, on the day of the primary election, it was glaring that the delegates were voting for the candidate of the choice when the first local government was called to file out to vote but the pro­cess has to be stopped and a strange method of asking delegates to give their bal­lots to someone else to fill their preferred candidate for them because most of them were illiterates. That was the point an aide to Fintiri who also served as his agent there took over the assignment and started filling Fintiri in the ballot papers of the delegates.
“The poll coordinator and former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr Dime­ji Bankole was alarmed by this and had to stop the pro­cess again.
He thereafter asked anoth­er person to step in to assist the delegates fill their ballots. The person who stepped in, Hamisu Medugu happens to be another of Fintiri’s agents who continued what the other person was accused of do­ing.”
Another prominent leader of the party based in Abuja expressed the same senti­ment, adding that he had an existing arrangement with delegates from his local government area to vote for Marwa.
“Nobody can convince me something did not go wrong with the process”, he added. When confronted with his candidate’s acceptance of the outcome of the poll, he said: “You should know that Gen. Marwa is a gentleman officer who would not want to rock the boat especially when he knows that the president has no hand in what happened. I can tell you Gen. Marwa had to accept the outcome to maintain the integrity of PDP and in the interest of Presi­dent Jonathan’s chances in 2015 as anything to the con­trary would have been capi­talized upon by the APC.”
Meanwhile, sources within the campaign teams of Mar­wa and Modibbo have con­firmed that the two aspirants were already aware of the anger among their supporters and have since begun vari­ous interventions to douse the tension.
“If we have to win the Oc­tober 11 election, we have to prevail on our supporters to put all that happened at the primary behind us and go into the election as one united party, otherwise the state is as good as going back to the APC which cannot be under-estimated”, Ahmed Umar, one of the Modibbo campaigners based in Yola, argued.

Fears over protest votes in Adamawa