*Accept defeat, you lost woefully – Lai Mohammed
*APC murdered sleep, must bear the Consequences – Obiora Ifoh
By Eze Chidozie and Daniel Tyokua
The federal government and Labour Party Sunday again engaged in “push and shove” over the outcome of the 2023 general elections, calling out the other as bad losers.
While the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, told Nigeria’s opposition parties to stop their lamentations over the outcome of the election and accept defeat, Labour Party’s Obiora Ifoh said Mohammed should hide his head in shame for being part of a government that elevated electoral malpractices to state craft.
Even as Mohammed insisted the opposition parties lost woefully, Ifoh said that APC’s presidential candidate, Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu was declared winner “because the election witnessed unprecedented magnitude of violence, ballot box snuffing, snatching and manipulation of results from the collation centres using thugs, security agencies, which included police, army amongst others”.
He said: “We just want the Minister to know that by rigging the 2023 general election, himself, his party, All Progressives Congress and the leader of the party, President Buhari, have murdered sleep and they do not deserve peace”.
Lai Mohammed had in the statement re-echoed President Mohammadu Buhari that both Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) lost election due to overconfidence and complacency.
Buhari had last week at his residence in the Presidential Villa, Abuja, while receiving the Progressive Governors Forum said that “they (opposition) were already telling their foreign backers that they would defeat the APC.
“Our party (APC) blended confidence with caution. We worked hard and won. Now, their over confidence is creating more problems for the opposition than anyone else. They are finding it hard to convince those who supported them from outside why they are unable to beat us.
“A combination of over confidence, complacency and bad tactical moves made them lose, plain and clear. This has created more problems in their camp. Why did they fail to remove us?”
In addition, Lai Mohammed said in a statement in Abuja through his Special Assistant (Media), Segun Adeyemi, restated that “Mr President’s analysis on the reasons for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible”.
According to him, 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,” he said.
He attributed the opposition’s overconfidence going into the election to “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”.
He stated further that “the presidential candidate of the APC, Bola 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.
“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.
“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, the minister slammed the opposition for continuously seeking to mislead the world by clutching at the weak straw that results were not immediately uploaded to 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.
”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 added.
On its part, Labour Party said the minister was trying to blackmail the Prsidential Election Petition Court by drumming his well orchestrated lies and ensuring he used such to intimidate and blackmail them.
“We would rather not join issues with a man who is famous for constantly prescribing doses of expired and ineffectual propaganda to Nigerians.
“His ill-fated and hugely failed trip to United Kingdom and United States where he attempted to redeem the grossly battered democratic credentials of this present administration; spending millions of tax payers money to defend an indefensible action is yet another tragedy of President Buhari’s 8 years leadership.
“We would rather not join issues with a man who is famous for constantly prescribing doses of expired and ineffectual propaganda to Nigerians.
“His ill-fated and hugely failed trip to United Kingdom and United States where he attempted to redeem the grossly battered democratic credentials of this present administration; spending millions of tax payers money to defend an indefensible action is yet another tragedy of President Buhari’s 8 years leadership.
“It is only the blind that will continue to insist that the 2023 presidential election which was massively rigged was free, fair and credible.
“As we have said earlier, the opposition political parties lost the election because the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC jettisoned the electoral act, having not uploaded the result from the polling unit in real time as promised and in so doing, created room for riggers to have a field day.
All these issues and a lot more were captured, well documented and have been taken to the appeal tribunal and the matters are on going. Mr. Lai Mohammed need not preempt the tribunal as his actions are contemptuous and could be used against him,” the party stressed.
