Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has accused All Progressives Congress (APC) of forcing civil servants and other people to register as their party members in Kano State.
The PDP made the claim in a statement on Sunday by its national spokesman, Kola Ologbondiyan.
It said that the alleged resort by leaders of APC to “political banditry of harassing and threatening Nigerians, particularly civil servants in Kano state, to register as members of the APC, against their will, further exposes the level of public rejection that is now confronting the party.”
The opposition party went further to describe the alleged action of the ruling party in Kano as “political terrorism” and “symptomatic of a dying party gasping for breathe.”
It added that “Nigerians have rejected the APC and will never be intimidated by such threats.”
The statement read in part, “One can only pity APC leaders over the crushing public apathy against their fraudulent membership registration exercise, for which their Kano state Chairman, Abdulahi Abbas, out of frustration, threatened civil servants and other innocent Nigerians in the state, to join their dying party or lose all benefits and opportunities from the state government.
“It is appalling that after being exposed in their scheme of hiding under their duplicitous membership revalidation and re-registration exercise to inflate their membership register with fictitious figures, the APC leaders are now shamelessly resorting to harassing innocent civil servants and their families to register in the party, against their will.
“The fact that the APC has been reduced to a situation where it is rather forcing and coercing Nigerians in their supposed strongholds of Kano, Kaduna and Katsina state, who ordinarily should be trooping out enmasse to register, only goes to show that the APC is already dead in their consciousness, having betrayed them in the last six years.
“Nigerians should therefore disregard any membership figures that are eventually released by the APC as that would only be a product of inflated numbers made up of fictitious names and forced registration.”
The APC is currently carrying a membership revalidation exercise across the 36 states of the country and Abuja.