Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture, has advised the opposition parties to quit whining about the 2023 presidential election and accept loss in the election they so badly lost.
Both Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, according to Mohammed, lost the election owing to overconfidence and complacency.
“Mr President’s analysis on the reasons for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 polls was incontrovertible,” the Minister said in a statement published in Abuja on Sunday by his Special Assistant (Media), Segun Adeyemi.
“President Buhari deserves nothing but praise for delivering unquestionably the best election in Nigeria’s history,” he said, adding that the opposition’s turbulent but inevitable response to the President’s statements exposed them for what they are: shameless bitter losers.
“President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his billing by conducting a free, fair, and credible election, ensuring his legacy.” “The President would rather lose his state and many of his party’s strongholds than tamper with election fidelity, which is why he provided a level playing field for all parties,” Mohammed continued.
He did, however, emphasise that the opposition’s overconfidence in the run-up to the election stemmed in part from a blitzkrieg of social media propaganda as well as faulty and procured opinion polls, which were apparently designed to dupe their foreign backers and a section of the international media into reporting uncritically that they were coasting home to victory when they were, in fact, heading into the ravine of defeat.
The minister also stated that the All Progressives Congress presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, won the presidential election fairly and squarely, capturing the majority of votes cast and exceeding the constitutionally mandated 25% of votes cast in at least two-thirds of all states in the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory.
“According to the results, none of the opposition parties met any of the requirements for winning the presidential poll.” Despite their pre-election grandstanding, they didn’t even come close.
“They (the opposition) continue to rely on international observers to support their fraudulent claim that the poll was rigged.”
“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 had unquestionably won the polls,” Mohammed continued.
“They also forgot that the African Union Election Observation Mission to Nigeria reported that the atmosphere was generally calm and peaceful in 95% of the polling units visited,” he said, adding that “many nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom, wasted no time in congratulating the victorious APC presidential candidate.”
In response to the IReV portal problem, Mohammed lambasted the opposition for always trying to deceive the world by grasping at the flimsy straw that results were not instantly published into the site as if it had any involvement in the compilation of results.
“The opposition’s insinuation that the failure to immediately upload the presidential poll results onto IReV affected the credibility of the election is a fraud,” he stated. It is a desperate person’s act of blackmail and deception.
“In particular, the opposition Labour Party will go down in history as the first-ever distant third-place finisher in a presidential election anywhere to have boldly claimed victory,” he said according to Punch Newspaper.
