Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture, has advised the opposition parties to quit whining about the 2023 presidential election and accept defeat in the election they badly lost.
Mohammed went on to say that both Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party lost the election owing to overconfidence and complacency.
In a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday by his Special Assistant (Media), Segun Adeyemi, the Minister 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 did, however, emphasize that the opposition’s overconfidence heading into the election stemmed in part from a blitzkrieg of social media propaganda as well as faulty and procured opinion polls, which were apparently meant to dupe their foreign backers and a section of the international media into uncritically reporting 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, receiving 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 findings, none of the opposition parties met any of the prerequisites for winning the presidential election. Despite their pre-election bravado, they didn’t even come close.
”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.”
In response to the IReV portal issue, Mohammed lambasted the opposition for constantly attempting to deceive the world by grasping at the flimsy straw that results were not instantly published onto the site as if it had any involvement in the compilation 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.