The Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC) has put a lie to the claim by Dr. Umar Ardo of ADA that the NDC’s registration by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, did not follow due process.
The party, in a statement signed by its National Secretary, Barr. Ikenna Morgan Enekweizu, said such a claim is not only mischievous and misleading, but a wicked lie from the pit of hell.
“This is not the first time Dr. Ardo would be peddling this same falsehood. We recall that barely 48 hours after INEC announced the registration of both NDC and DLA, Ardo was on an ARISE NEWS programme dishing out the same falsehood about NDC and making insinuations on why it was registered.
“Rather than concern himself with his ADA which failed to scale the INEC hurdle, Ardo had spent a large chunk of his allotted airtime attacking NDC, saying he did not comprehend how the party came to be registered.
Curiously, more than a month after that ARISE NEWS interview, Ardo has still not made good his promise to approach the Lokoja court that gave the ruling, on the strength of which the NDC was registered by INEC. Rather, he has gone again on Trust TV to repeat the same lies”.
‘Our position’ the NDC statement said, “is that Dr. Ardo knows the truth but has chosen to follow the ignoble path of shunning the truth for some selfish or sinister reasons.”
That truth, according to the NDC National Secretary, is that “the processes for the registration of the NDC predates the 2025 date Ardo is bandying about”.
“NDC first applied for registration as far back as 2017. And was among the initial 171 associations that sought registration.
“It only approached the court when it felt dissatisfied with the reasons INEC, under Prof. Yakubu, advanced for dropping the party from the process and almost aborting its registration.
“NDC went to court when it was not allowed to proceed to the next stage Dr. Ardo is talking about, be it be last 14 or last 8.
“ We went to court because INEC said the NDC Victory-sign logo of two upward-pointed fingers was similar to the APC Broom logo.
NDC disagreed with that submission and approached the Federal High Court to challenge that position, insisting it is an abuse of discretion.
INEC legal team was served and it appeared at the Court to defend the commission’s position. Before the court, the INEC team affirmed that all the requirements for registration had been made by the NDC, except for the position the commission took on the logo.
“The judge, after listening to all arguments, over ruled INEC, saying that the logos were not only clearly different, but that INEC’S position of knocking out NDC on that basis interfered with our fundamental freedom of association, and thereafter ordered INEC to register NDC. The court thus enforced NDC’s right to association and gave an express order for its registration to INEC, an order which INEC complied with and did not appeal.
“It is also instructive to note that the window of time allowed for such an appeal has since elapsed.
“This parly explains the reason why until recently, INEC had yet to reflect the NDC logo or upload it on the INEC website. In the stead of the NDC logo, the electoral commission simply put ‘COURT ORDER’ ”, the NDC statement pointed out.
The truth, the NDC scribe said, is that the party had met every requirement for registration long before the Umar Ardo’s ADA did so ( if it did so), and only went to court when it was excluded from the shortlist of 14 political associations being considered for registration, on the strength of the questionable rejection of the NDC logo – a logo which INEC said bore a close semblance of the APC logo. NDC disagreed with that position, and the court concurred.
“INEC soon announced NDC as a political party, based on that court order, and proceeded to issue NDC a certificate of registration as a political party.
“The NDC has since started its activities as a political party. And only two weeks ago, it held its first NEC meeting, after serving INEC the mandatory 21 days notice, and INEC attended event and fully monitored the processes
The party has also given INEC the mandatory notices for its congresses and convention scheduled to hold soon”.
Enekweizu pointed out that since its registration and public presentation, NDC’s officers and leaders have been working round the clock to introduce the party to Nigerians in all states of the Federation and Abuja. They have also been aggressively promoting the party.
“We thank Nigerians both within and in the Diaspora for the huge outpouring of love and enthusiasm in the way they have accepted the party and are massively registering as members of the NDC”
According to him, “this is largely due to the person of the party’s National Leader, Senator Henry Seriake Dickson whom millions of Nigerians have come to accept as authentic and a politician of conviction, not convenience”.
“They have come to accept our party as a credible alternative to the decadence foited on the country by the incumbent APC government. They have come to believe in us as the key bastion against the impending descent into a one-party state, which the APC is pursuing, against our avowed preference for a multi-party democracy.”
“Of course, we in the NDC are not so naiveas not to know that the forces of darkness are uneasy with the light and breath of fresh that the NDC has come to represent, especially with widespread defections into the new party from both the ruling APC and other political parties from across the country. So we cannot say we were not expecting the shenanigans of Dr. Ardo and his ilk.
“We know those who have been funding Dr. Ardo to demarket NDC. We know Dr. Ardo to be an agent of the APC, working to destabilise and demarket the opposition and help push the one-party state agenda of the APC. Many of the Umar Ardo campaign are APC governors and chieftains who are well known to us, and who have suddenly become very jittery with the rising profile of the NDC, a party which they had initially given no chance.
Rather than make demarketing NDC his project, Umar Ardo would do well to tell Nigerians the truth as to what happened to his ADA.
We have it on good authority that ADA was denied registration for no other reason than Umar Ardo’s treachery and selfishness.
“ADA which was the initial preferred platform of the opposition coalition failed to be registered when Umar Ardo went behind the leaders of the coalition to substitute the names of protem officers nominated by coalition leaders like Atiku Abubakar, Rotimi Amaechi and others with his own name as Secretary and Uche Secondus as Chairman”.
The NDC scribe revealed that Umar Ardo who is close to the National Leader of the NDC had initially sought the advice of Dickson on how to proceed, when it was becoming clear that ADA registration might hit a brickwall.
According to him, Dickson had advised ADA to do the same thing NDC was doing by taking INEC to court, explaining that INEC has no powers not to register the party if it meets the minimal requirements demanded by the commission.
Unfortunately for ADA, Umar Ardo was seeking to sideline the leaders if the opposition, and register the party for himself. So, when he filed his suit on behalf of the ADA, other coalition elements were taken aback, when the reality of what Umar Ardo filled became public. Other leaders of the coalition promptly filed a counter suit challenging Ardo.
That disagreement within the ADA, more than anything else, is responsible for why INEC refused to register ADA, But instead of telling the public this truth, Ardo is busy doing his paymasters’ bidding of trying to rubbish NDC”.
Curiously, Ardo has remained ominously silent on the NDP, another association which equally toed the path of NDC, by going to court, and which also won in court and has now been registered by INEC as a political party. That registration came after NDC’s. But Umar Ardo won’t say anything about the NDP because he feels the NDP might not yet possess the strength and wide acceptance that NDC has garnered in less than one month of receiving its certificate of registration.
“We would ordinarily have accepted to have Umar Ardo join us in the NDC to build the kind of credible opposition we envisage, that can challenge and defeat APC at the polls, but his track record of betrayal, selfishness and total lack loyalty and integrity have knocked him out of reckoning, as the NDC has no place for such characters as Umar Ardo, who is clearly working for the APC while pretending to hobnob with the coalition of opposition parties.
“Having destroyed the League of Northern Democrats (LND) of which he is the Convener, and also compromised the registration of ADA, Umar Ardo is now seeking to pull down the NDC. He is clearly on a mission, a mission to help APC destroy every possible opposition ahead of the 2027 general elections, and impose a one-party state against the wishes of Nigerians and all true democrats”
SIGNED
Barr. Ikenna Morgan Enekweizu
National Secretary
08064726791
