Lacs, February 23 A senate candidate in next Saturday’s parliamentary elections in Nigeria and five of his supporters were murdered last night, his political party, the Labor Party, has confirmed.
Unidentified gunmen killed and burned Labor candidate for the southern Enugu state senatorial constituency, Oyibo Chukwu, local media reported today.
The gunmen also killed five of his supporters who were traveling with him in an election campaign vehicle.
“It is true that our senatorial candidate from Enugu East senatorial district for Saturday’s elections was killed. They (the attackers) shot him and five other people and set them on fire,” the candidate said. as Governor of Enugu from the Labor Party, Chijioke Edeoga.
“Members of our party are being killed by political parties that have felt threatened by the rise of Labor in the state and fear losing Saturday’s election,” Edeoga said.
The event came a few days after Nigeria, the most populous country (more than 200 million inhabitants) and the largest democracy in Africa, will organize presidential and legislative elections this Saturday in a climate of insecurity in some parts of the country.
The elections are billed as the most competitive since the restoration of democracy in 1999.
The outgoing president’s replacement, Muhammadu Buhari, will come out of the polls, who is not seeking re-election as he exhausts the second four-year term allowed by the Constitution.
Labor presidential candidate Peter Obi is seeking to break the bipartisanship between the current All Progressives Congress (APC) and the opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), which have dominated national politics since 1999.
The elections will take place with security challenges such as the jihadist threat in the northeast of the country, where the Boko Haram group and its dissident, the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), lead attacks.
Similarly, the central and northwestern states of Nigeria are under constant attack by “bandits”, a term used to refer to criminal gangs who commit mass robberies, robberies and kidnappings for lucrative ransoms. EFE
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