The All Progressives Congress says President Goodluck Jonathan has employed an Israeli expert to interrupt the frequency of card readers on the election day in order to frustrate the use of the machines.The APC, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said the card reader jammers can undermine the effectiveness of the card reader from over 100 metres.
The statement read, “We can authoritatively inform Nigerians that the morbid fear of card readers by the Jonathan administration and the PDP has now been translated into concrete action: They have hired an Israeli to do the dirty job of jamming the card readers.
“To those who might accuse us of crying wolf, they should realise that every alarm we have raised in the past has been true, including that the Jonathan administration was pushing for the postponement of the elections and that they are mortally afraid of the use of Permanent Voter Cards and card readers.”
The APC said the Israeli was hired specifically to develop three prototype card reader jammers, and that he has now developed three of such jammers to be carried in the pockets of trusted PDP stalwarts on election day with a view to disabling the card readers within the state radius.
The party said that apart from disabling the card readers, the jammers would also disable all telephones and computers within the radius of those carrying them on their persons.
It said an order had been placed for 75,000 pieces of the jammers at a cost of $200 per piece, bringing the total cost to $15m.
The statement added, “The plan is to deploy the card jammers to the areas deemed to be the strongholds of the APC, such as the North-West, North-East, North-Central and the South-West.
“It is the planned procurement of the jammers that have given the confidence to the administration and party officials to continuously boast that Buhari will never rule Nigeria, and also the reason why a chieftain of the PDP boasted last week that the card readers won’t work, thus advising INEC to make alternative arrangements.’’
