The ward congress of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has ended in crisis in Ekiti State, south-west Nigeria.

This comes as a group in the party led by the PDP Organising Secretary in Ekiti, Mr Ayo Oladimeji, accused the immediate past governor of the state, Ayodele Fayose, and his loyalists of hijacking the process.

The exercise ended in crisis as the group besieged the purported location where they attacked vehicles said to belong to the former governor and his allies before the intervention of security officials.

The leader of the electoral team and Deputy Governor of Taraba state, Haruna Manu, could not be reached for comments before leaving the state.

Addressing reporters, Oladimeji alleged that the former governor compromised the electoral officers from Abuja by concocting fake results at a hotel in Ado Ekiti, the state capital.

He said, “Those materials, the results; they didn’t go to those places they were meant to go to and those are the issues that generated problems.

“They went to hidden places which we’ve just discovered now, they wrote all the results which they were supposed to have collated on the field according to the directive.”

The Game Master

The organising secretary said he complained to the Taraba State deputy governor that some of the materials were hijacked.

He insisted that the electoral officers did not go to the respective local governments where they were directed to conduct the congress but stayed elsewhere to write the results.

In his reaction, Fayose’s spokesman, Lere Olayinka, faulted the allegations, saying the complainants were politically naïve.

Rather, he accused the group of “jumping the gun” by proceeding with the congress hours before the arrival of the designated electoral officers from the nation’s capital.

Olayinka said, “You don’t go into a contest like this if you don’t have your brain intact; if you are not in charge, if you are not in control. In this game, Ayo Fayose is a master of the game and he just showed to them that he is a master of that game.

He stated that according to the party’s constitution, the State Working Committee has no role to play in congress.

The former governor’s spokesman accused the group of setting up a “kangaroo committee” and going from one local government to the other.