The All Progressives Congress says it met the Independent National Electoral Commission’s deadline for submitting candidates for the 2027 presidential and parliamentary elections.

The party’s spokesman, Felix Morka, disclosed this in a statement issued on Sunday in Abuja.

Mr Morka said the APC completed the submission despite fielding a significantly larger number of candidates for various elective offices across the country. He stated that INEC extended the original July 11 deadline to 14 after opposition parties requested additional time to complete their submissions.

According to him, the electoral commission acted within its statutory powers and administrative discretion by approving the extension.

“While INEC acted within its statutory powers and administrative discretion in extending the deadline for opposition parties, the extension reflected their failure,” Mr Morka said.

He explained that the opposition’s inability to meet the deadline exposed weaknesses in its management of internal nomination processes, despite handling fewer candidates than the APC.

Mr Morka described the development as another indication of what he called the opposition’s chronic organisational weaknesses and questioned its operational capacity.

According to him, parties unable to conclude internal nomination processes efficiently cannot be trusted with governing Nigeria or its sub-national governments.

“They do not possess the competence, discipline or readiness required to govern our great nation or its sub-national governments,” he stated.

Mr Morka also accused opposition parties of hypocrisy over their previous allegations that the APC controlled INEC’s decisions.

“It is starkly ironic that the same opposition parties repeatedly claimed the APC dictates INEC’s decisions. Yet, after missing the submission deadline, they shamelessly sought relief from the same INEC and received an extension,” Mr Morka said.

He noted that the APC, despite benefiting from the original deadline, neither opposed nor influenced INEC’s decision after completing its submissions.

“Again, this underscores the opposition’s hypocrisy and true character as peddlers of fake news and merchants of blackmail,” he stated.

(NAN)