Turmoil Engulfs PRP Ahead of Presidential Primary as Ufere's Team Calls for New Poll

The Peoples Redemption Party's presidential campaign organization, led by Dr Nnaoke Ufere, has formally rejected the outcome of the party's presidential primary, which took place on 25 May 2026, citing evidence of manipulated results in favour of former Cross River State governor, Mr Donald Duke.

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This rejection was conveyed in a statement signed by Ishaq Alhassan, Executive Director of the Ufere2027 Presidential Campaign, and made available on Tuesday in Abuja, where the organization presented arithmetic evidence to support its claims of vote inflation beyond the official membership register submitted to the Independent National Electoral Commission on 4 May 2026.

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The campaign organization described the official membership register as the "single source of truth agreed by all parties before a single ballot was cast", and presented state-by-state figures that allegedly made the manipulation impossible to deny, including a 311 per cent inflation in Gombe, where a register of 348 members produced 1,431 declared votes.

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In Bauchi, 593 registered members produced 760 votes, an excess of 167, while in Kwara, 55 members produced 82 votes, further highlighting the discrepancies in the voting process, with the campaign noting that across these three states alone, 996 registered members produced 2,273 votes, meaning 1,277 ballots corresponded to no eligible voter on the party's own INEC-approved list.

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The statement emphasized that "a register is a ceiling" and that "turnout cannot exceed 100 per cent of the people allowed to vote", underscoring the campaign's assertion that every vote beyond the register is, by definition, a vote that should never have been counted, with the phantom votes breaking "overwhelmingly, in state after state", in favour of Duke.

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Duke, who 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, yet allegedly offered to refund rival aspirants their costs if they would step aside and allow him to emerge as a consensus candidate.

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In contrast, the statement highlighted that 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, raising serious questions about the outcome of the primary.

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The campaign organization also alleged that party insiders had described the outcome as deliberately engineered, pointing to reported plans for Duke to run alongside Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed, younger brother of PRP National Chairman, Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, and 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 that the Harvard-educated venture capitalist and anti-corruption advocate refused in their entirety.

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The statement cited documented instances of contestants allegedly paying over N500,000 to PRP state chairmen to procure votes, which Ufere refused to do, and noted that "the lesson of this primary is stark: the aspirant who would not buy votes was defeated by votes that were bought or fabricated".

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Aside from the numerical irregularities, the campaign described widespread administrative collapse on the day of the primary, including the absence or severe delay of INEC officials at multiple locations, with members in the FCT waiting roughly five hours before any process commenced, and the party's admission that funds approved for the conduct of the election never reached many states and local government areas.

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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, and that 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.

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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, and the campaign 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 that would constitute electoral violence requiring immediate investigation if confirmed.

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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, a difference of 4,591 members representing a 59 per cent increase after the official rules had already been set.

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The statement emphasized that "it cannot be changed after polling simply because the declared figures expose what they expose", and that "any attempt to retroactively swap the register is not a correction, it is a second irregularity layered on the first", demanding the immediate suspension of collation and any declaration of a presidential nominee.

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The Ufere2027 Campaign consequently demanded 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, and an independent investigation into the concentration of excess votes in Duke's favour.

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The campaign also called for the conduct of a fresh presidential primary in full compliance with party rules, 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.

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