The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said this in a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday by Segun Adeyemi, the Special Assistant to the President on Media, Office of the Minister of Information and Culture.
The Nigerian government has asked the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and other opposition political parties to stop wailing over their loss in the 2023 presidential election.
The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said this in a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday by Segun Adeyemi, the Special Assistant to the President on Media, Office of the Minister of Information and Culture.
The minister said the opposition candidates lost woefully, adding that they knew they deserved to lose the election because of their overconfidence and complacency.
Mohammed said President Muhammadu Buhari’s analysis of the reasons for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible, adding that the President deserves nothing but accolades for delivering undoubtedly the best election in Nigeria’s history.
According to the minister, the tempestuous but predictable reaction to the President’s comments by the opposition has shown them for what they are – “shameless sore losers.”
The minister who earlier accused Obi of treason for challenging the outcome of the election said that “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.”
He said, “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.”
Mohammed insisted that the presidential candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, won the presidential election fair and square, by 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.
He said, “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. They conveniently forgot what Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the revered US diplomat who co-led the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) 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.”
The minister said that based on the reports, many nations, including the US and the UK wasted no time in congratulating Tinubu.
Mohammed further slammed the opposition for what he described as continuously seeking to mislead the world by clutching at the weak straw that results were not immediately uploaded onto the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Result Viewing (IReV) portal, saying the portal has no role to play in the collation of results.
”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.
”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,” he said.