By Emmanuel Mogbede
#TrackNigeria: All Progressives Congress (APC) Directorate of Election Planning and Monitoring has assured Nigerians that their votes will count in the general elections which begin on Saturday with the Presidential and National Assembly polls.
Mr Babatunde Fashola, the Director of the Directorate and Minister of Power, Works and Housing, gave the assurance at a news conference in Abuja on Wednesday.
Fashola said the conference was aimed at sensitising the party’s agents for the coming elections to their rights and responsibilities at the polling units on election day.
He said the Directorate had trained all the party’s agents ahead of the elections.
Fashola noted that if the electoral process was made transparent, all the rumours about rigging the elections would be dispelled.
He added that scrutinising the electoral process would lead to a free, fair and credible general elections which all Nigerians desired.
He said APC was confident that the votes of the electorate were out there, waiting for it.
“We know that the votes are out there, we know that the people will vote for us because our party has worked very hard even with limited resources to do impossible things.
“We have built bridges, roads and many other things, and we are ready to face the electorate with the results of our works in government,” he said.
He said that there was nowhere in the country, even in the most rural area, that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration had not done one intervention project.
Fashola said the projects included electricity, water supply, road construction and refurbishment and reconstruction of schools.
He said the beneficiaries of such projects would connect with APC and ensure that the government that cared for them was re-elected to enable it to continue impacting positively on their lives.
Fashola added that the people would not see a government that was responding to their needs after several years of neglect and not connect with it.
“It is their responsibility now to keep this government in office by re-electing it to do more.
“The reason we had a change of government in 2015 was because the government then was not responding to the needs of majority of Nigerians,” he said.
The minister expressed optimism that the coming elections would be hitch-free and that the card readers would work well.
He, however, said that in the event that the card reader failed in a particular polling unit, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had made provisions in the voters’ register to address such situation.
He added that so long as the biometric and other information on an individual’s Permanent Voter Card (PVC) tallied with what was in INEC Presiding Officer’s register, such an individual could vote. (NAN)
