Presidential Primary: Crisis hits PRP as Ufere campaign demands fresh election

By Omeiza Ajayi

ABUJA: The presidential campaign organization of Dr Nnaoke Ufere, of the Peoples Redemption Party PRP, has rejected the outcome of the party’s presidential primary held on 25 May 2026, presenting arithmetic evidence it says proves the declared results were manipulated in favour of former Cross River State governor, Mr Donald Duke.

In a statement signed by Ishaq Alhassan, Executive Director of the Ufere2027 Presidential Campaign and made available to Vanguard on Tuesday in Abuja, the organization accused officials of inflating votes beyond the ceiling set by the official membership register submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC on 4 May 2026.

It described the document as “the single source of truth agreed by all parties before a single ballot was cast.”

The campaign presented state-by-state figures it said made the manipulation impossible to deny. In Gombe, a register of 348 members produced 1,431 declared votes — a 311 per cent inflation, with over 1,000 ballots the campaign described as “phantom.” In Bauchi, 593 registered members produced 760 votes, an excess of 167. In Kwara, 55 members produced 82 votes. Across the three states alone, 996 registered members produced 2,273 votes — meaning 1,277 ballots, more than half the total declared vote, corresponded to no eligible voter on the party’s own INEC-approved list.

“A register is a ceiling. Turnout cannot exceed 100 per cent of the people allowed to vote. Every vote beyond the register is, by definition, a vote that should never have been counted,” the statement read.

The campaign noted that the phantom votes broke “overwhelmingly, in state after state,” in favour of Duke, who it said joined the PRP only days before the primary after defecting from another platform, did not campaign publicly at any point during the contest, and was reportedly outside the country while the election was being conducted.

It further alleged that Duke openly offered to refund rival aspirants their costs if they would step aside and allow him to emerge as a consensus candidate.

By contrast, the statement said Ufere actively campaigned in all 36 states and the FCT, sponsored voter registration and member engagement efforts nationwide, funded a women’s mobilisation programme, and provided logistics support to enable grassroots members to attend events.

“A candidate who made that level of visible investment in party mobilization being defeated by a candidate who neither campaigned nor participated openly in the process raises serious questions that demand credible answers,” it said.

The campaign also alleged that party insiders had described the outcome as deliberately engineered, and pointing to reported plans for Duke to run alongside Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed, younger brother of PRP National Chairman, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed.

The campaign stopped short of stating the allegation as established fact but said it carried “an obligation” for the party’s leadership to answer.

It also disclosed that it was in possession of voice recordings in which some persons solicited payments running into millions of naira in exchange for delivering votes to Ufere — demands the Harvard-educated venture capitalist and anti-corruption advocate refused in their entirety.

The statement additionally cited documented instances of contestants allegedly paying over N500,000 to PRP state chairmen to procure votes.

“Dr Nnaoke Ufere refused every such demand without exception. He has spent his public life as a voice against corruption in Nigeria’s institutions, and he was not prepared to secure a nomination by becoming part of the very system he has consistently opposed.

“The lesson of this primary is stark: the aspirant who would not buy votes was defeated by votes that were bought or fabricated”, the statement noted. 

Aside the numerical irregularities, the campaign described widespread administrative collapse on the day of the primary. INEC officials were said to have been absent or severely delayed at multiple locations, with members in the FCT waiting roughly five hours before any process commenced.

The statement also said the party admitted that funds approved for the conduct of the election never reached many states and local government areas — a failure it attributed directly to National Chairman Baba-Ahmed. 

The campaign alleged that the funding vacuum created conditions under which contestants stepped in to provide money to presiding officers and state officials for food, accommodation and logistics — fatally compromising the independence of the process.

It said state chairmen and primary election committee chairpersons appointed by Baba-Ahmed complained openly about the disorder on the party’s official WhatsApp group in real time, and that the National Chairman himself walked out of the collation centre at the party’s national headquarters and did not return until the crowd had dispersed.

The statement also reported that in the late hours of the exercise, organized groups armed with knives were brought to a polling location in the FCT and used to intimidate remaining voters — a development it said, if confirmed, would constitute electoral violence requiring immediate investigation.

The campaign further rejected what it described as a post-primary attempt to substitute the governing membership register with a new list dated 25 May 2026, containing 12,378 members — compared with 7,787 on the INEC-approved 4th May register. The difference of 4,591 members represented a 59 per cent increase after the official rules had already been set.

“It cannot be changed after polling simply because the declared figures expose what they expose. Any attempt to retroactively swap the register is not a correction. It is a second irregularity layered on the first,” the statement said.

The Ufere2027 Campaign consequently demanded the immediate suspension of collation and any declaration of a presidential nominee; a full forensic audit of every vote measured against the 4th May INEC-approved register; publication of complete state-by-state and LGA-by-LGA accreditation and voting figures; nullification of all results in which votes exceeded the eligible register; an independent investigation into the concentration of excess votes in Duke’s favour; and the conduct of a fresh presidential primary in full compliance with party rules.

It also called for full accountability for persons responsible for the administrative failure, missing funds, reported violence and vote manipulation, and demanded an immediate investigation into the reported armed intimidation at the FCT polling location.

“The Peoples Redemption Party was built on a tradition of principled, accountable politics. That tradition is not honoured by a primary in which the votes outnumber the voters. The numbers are public now. They can be explained, or they can be answered for. They cannot be wished away”, the campaign organization declared. 

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