•Ayodele Adio
The candidate of the Youth Party in the upcoming Eti-Osa Local Government Area Chairmanship election, Ayodele Adio, has said that the All Progressives Congress (APC) carried out a political MMM with its local government primary elections in Lagos State.
MMM was a Ponzi scheme in Nigeria that rose and crashed in 2016, dashing the hopes of many who had invested their hard-earned money in it.
According to Adio, who spoke during an interview with News Central TV, the APC carried out a similar scheme when the party dashed the hopes of many who had bought forms to contest in the LG primary elections last week.
He said, “The problem with the APC in Lagos was that they had told the people to come and buy forms, which were pegged at N5.5 million for chairmanship, and they had told the people that they were going to conduct primary elections to decide who would be the flagbearers of the party. As I heard, 500 people bought chairmanship forms, and hundreds of others bought councillorship forms.
“The next thing was that the party announced that there would be no refund of those amounts paid. And then, three days before the election, they announced that they were going to adopt candidates through consensus.
“That sounds to me like political MMM, because if you knew from the onset that this was what you wanted to do—that you wanted to adopt consensus candidates across the board—you shouldn’t have started selling forms at N5.5 million and have people expend scarce resources to purchase those forms, only to deny them a level playing field to contest in a free and fair primary election. I think that does a lot of disservice to our electoral process because you are sort of breeding a culture of impunity and a lack of fairness, and that’s why you see the internal wrangling.”
