THE presidential candidate of the New Nigeria Peoples Party in the just concluded presidential election, Musa Kwankwaso, on Thursday. expressed dissatisfaction over what he described as poor printing of the party’s logo by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
According to him, what the commission presented as the logo of the NNPP was good enough to cancel the whole national election, insisting that a lot of the party’s supporters were disenfranchised.
Kwankwaso, a former Minister of Defence and former governor of Kano State stated these during the National Executive Committee meeting of the NNPP in Abuja.
He threatened to seek redress in court against INEC if the situation was not looked into in subsequent elections.
He said, “I think this is an opportunity to say that all our members were not happy with the way and manner our logo was presented on ballot papers was very had. It is so sad that we had to face these challenges at the last minute. Most people including my humble self had to struggle very hard to identify our logo. I believe that our party will now sit down and work out how we can present our logo for the next election.
“My appeal to either INEC now is that, please, one of the problems of our logo is the quality of printing and now we are going for elections in three or four states.
“We don’t want to be in a hurry to go to court on some of these issues. But I believe under normal circumstance, what INEC presented as our logo, in a civilized society is good enough to cancel the national election. We were disenfranchised.
“We are not properly presented or represented on the logo and that went a long way in creating so much difficulty for our candidates and therefore for party.”
While expressing satisfaction over the party’s overall performance in the 2023 general elections, Kwankwaso said the NNPP gained popularity across the country within the shortest possible time before the elections.
The national chairman of the party, Prof. Rufa’i Alkali, assured Nigerians that following the victory of the party in the Kano state governorship election, the state would become the torch-bearer among other states in the establishment of a government that cares for human life and happiness.
He, therefore, urged the Kano state Governor-elect, Abba Yusuf, to stand out, work assiduously and take the necessary steps to consolidate and build upon the indelible legacies and giant strides of Kwankwaso.
Alkali maintained that the presidential election left behind a “trail of anger, bitterness and uncertainty with many unanswered questions agitating for answers”.
He said, “In my view, for anybody to have legitimate authority in this country, he must have political victory, legal victory, and moral victory. The questions to ask are: have Nigerians accepted the verdict of this presidential election? Has the international community accepted the outcome of the election? Have other political parties in the country accepted the results or congratulated the declared winner?
“We believe that Nigerians are the true and better judges of whether a candidate of a political party who is said to have won less than 10 percent of the registered votes and less than five per cent of Nigeria’s total population with a controversial past and under controversial circumstances is acceptable to Nigerians. As it is today it is not over until it is over.”