The spokesperson of the Atiku/Okowa Campaign Organisation, Daniel Bwala, has accused the All Progressives Congress (APC) of trying to frustrate the cashless policy introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria to engage in vote buying in the 2023 election.
The Senate on Thursday urged the CBN to extend its deadline for the phasing out of the old N1,000, N500 and N200 notes from January 31st to June 30th, 2023.
Speaking on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Friday, Bwala said the CBN is only seeking to improve free and fair elections through its policies but the APC is opposing it because the party intends to continue with electoral malpractices.
Bwala said, “Now what we have seen as progressive growth towards a better election is that there used to be vote-snatching, ballot stuffing and all of that, now when they introduced the electoral act amendment, it sort of took out the idea of snatching of ballots by the fact that there is the electronic transmission of results whilst votes are cast, casting and counting at the polling unit.
“Another thing is the introduction of the bank policy which seeks to stop vote buying because vote buying is one of the major if not major problems that is affecting free and fair processes. Ordinarily, that is to be accepted by everyone without a doubt, unfortunately, there is a party called All Progressives Congress that is consistently opposing this idea. What the CBN policy seeks to achieve is to stop bullion van politics.”
However, an APC member, Senator Ayo Arise, disagreed with Bwala, saying that the attribution of appeal to extend the CBN policy to APC by the PDP member is unfortunate.
“It’s unfortunate that the gentleman is attributing the extension to APC or any form of resistance to the cashless policy. It’s just that this is the political season but otherwise you noticed that before Nigerians trooped out to register for the national identity numbers, the Minister of Communications had to compel those who do not have NIN numbers should not to have their phones working, so everybody rushed that.
“Initially there was a term period and subsequently there were extensions, so why did we not tie that to politics? These are policies that come every now and then to improve on many functionalities of the government,” Senator Arise said.
