Protesters explain why they took coffin to PDP secretariat yesterday

Some aggrieved PDP as­pirants, who were disqualified from participating in last week­end River state assemblies pri­maries yesterday stormed the PDP national secre­tariat in Abuja with a coffin in protest An aspirant, Davis Saloka, said they were at the PDP secretariat to kick against the “open robbery per­petrated against them by the party.” He told newsmen that about 107 members of the party paid to obtain the nomination forms, but that only 32 whom he claimed were loyalists of Nyesom Wike, were given what he called “dubious clearance,” while the rest of them were disqualified. “We all bought forms to participate in the PDP primary election but what we saw was out of the ordinary. We attended the screening exercise but we did not know our fate until Friday night when we saw a list pasted, in­dicating that only 32 persons were cleared to participate in the election. “We discovered that those nominated from Wike’s camp were given clearance which gave them automatic ticket while the rest of us were screened out. The most annoying thing was that we were not told the reason we were disqualified, and it is more curious to note that all we saw was a list that was neither signed nor was on a PDP letter head, but just contained the names of Wike’s boys as the only ones cleared to participate in the party pri­mary. “On Saturday, they just wrote the names of these peo­ple and said they were the win­ners of the PDP party primary where elections were not held. It is injustice, we won’t ac­cept it,” he said.