The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has accused the All Progressives Congress (APC) of resisting the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) new notes changing schedule between December and January so as to encourage vote buying during the 2023 elections.
The spokesperson of the Atiku/Okowa Presidential Campaign Organisation, Daniel Bwala, in a media interaction on Channels Television on Friday said that the ruling APC is plotting to frustrate the cashless policy introduced by the Central Bank of Nigeria in order to encourage vote buying in the 2023 elections.
The Senate and the House of Representatives had on Thursday told the CBN to extend its deadline for the changing of the old N1,000, N500 and N200 notes with the new note from January 31st to June 30th, 2023.
Bwala noted that while the CBN is seeking to improve free and fair elections through its policies, the APC is opposing it because the party intends to continue with electoral malpractices.
According to Bwala: “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.”
A stakeholder in the APC, Senator Ayo Arise, argued that the attribution of appeal to extend the CBN policy to APC, as resistance, by the PDP, is unfortunate.
According to Arise, “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.”