The candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the February 3 bye-election for Ebonyi South Zone, Barr. Silas Onu and INEC have disagreed over the alleged hike in the price of certified True Copy of documents obtainable from the commission.
Barr. Onu had accused the commission of subtly stalling and stifling his moves and the process of filing a petition against the said winner of the polls, Prof. Anthony Ani of the All Progressives Congress in court.
Onu claimed that the normal charge of N10 for a page of Certified True Copy had been hiked and pegged at N300 for his sake, just to dissuade him from filing the appeal.
Speaking with LEADERSHIP Weekend in Abakaliki, Barr. Onu said INEC connived to bring a court action against me, leading to a bizarre judgment delivered two days to election.
“INEC is now actively ensuring that we do not get the electoral materials necessary for filing our petition. We applied for CTC and since then, it has been one story to another. They charged N300 per page for CTC, while that amount for CTC is and has remained N10 per page.
“Then they sent a private account number of one Ibrahim for the payment of the N300 per page for CTC.
We have refused to pay and they aren’t showing up to discharge their duty. We have to put this out for the public to see how INEC now have become fully and unpretentiously partisan in the discharge of their duty,” he said.
When contacted, the head of legal department, Ibrahim Obiahu, described the allegation as baseless.
He said, “It’s not true. That’s not true. Even though I shouldn’t speak on this; but it’s not true.”