The Federal Government says the presidential candidate of Labour Party in the last general election, Peter Obi, has set a new global record by being the first-ever distant third-place finisher to lay claim to victory.
Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, who stated this in a statement on Sunday in Abuja, called on Obi and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to stop shedding tears over the outcome of the poll, which he claimed they lost woefully to Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) .
“The opposition Labour Party, in particular, will go down in the history books as the first-ever distant third-place finisher in a presidential election anywhere to have bold-facedly claimed victory,” the minister said in the statement issued by his Special Assistant (Media), Segun Adeyemi.
He said, “Mr President’s analysis on the reasons for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible.
“President Buhari deserves nothing but accolades for delivering undoubtedly the best election in Nigeria’s history, adding that the tempestuous but predictable reaction to the President’s comments by the opposition has shown them for what they are: shameless sore losers.
”President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his billing by delivering a free, fair and credible election, and his legacy is assured. The President would rather lose his state and many of his party’s strongholds than tamper with the fidelity of the election, and that is why he provided a level playing field for all parties,” Mohammed added.
He, however, stressed that the opposition’s overconfidence going into the election stemmed in part from the blitzkrieg of social media propaganda as well as faulty and procured opinion polls, which were apparently meant to hoodwink their foreign backers and a section of the international media into uncritically reporting that they were coasting home to victory when they were indeed heading into the ravine of defeat.
The minister further said that Tinubu, won the presidential election fair and square, clinching the majority of the votes cast and surpassing the constitutionally-stipulated 25% of votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of all the states in the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory.
“Going by the results, none of the opposition parties met any of the conditions stipulated for winning the presidential election. They didn’t even come close, in spite of their pre-election grandstanding.
”They (opposition) keep leaning on some international observers to justify their fraudulent claim that the election was rigged.”
Continuing, Mohammed said, “They conveniently forgot what Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the revered US diplomat who co-led the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute International Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said that the APC candidate undoubtedly won the polls.
”They also forgot that the African Union Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said the atmosphere was generally calm and peaceful in 95% of the polling units visited,” he said, adding that it is on the strength of these reports that many nations, including the US and the UK, wasted no time in congratulating the victorious APC presidential candidate.”
Reacting to the issue of IReV portal, Mohammed slammed the opposition for continuously seeking to mislead the world by clutching at the weak straw that results were not immediately uploaded onto the portal as if it has any role to play in the collation of results.
He said, “The opposition’s insinuation that the failure to immediately upload the result of the presidential election onto IReV affected the credibility of the election is a fraud. It is an act of blackmail and deceit by desperate individuals.”
Abujapress reports that according to results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission, Tinubu scored a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat his closest rivals and candidates of PDP Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, LP, who polled 6,984, 520 and 6,101,533 votes respectively.
Tinubu is expected to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari on 29th May, 2023, even as both Obi and Atiku are separately challenging the election results at the presidential election tribunal in Abuja.
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