Atiku, Obi Accept Defeat, You Lost Woefully – Lai Mohammed

Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture, has advised the opposition parties to stop their clutching over the 2023 presidential election and accept defeat over the election they lost woefully.

The minister said this in a 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.

According to Mohammed, President Buhari deserves an accolade for delivering the best election in Nigeria’s history. He said “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”.

He said the president provided a free, credible and fair election, and his legacy is assured. Also, the president would rather lose his state and some of his party’s stronghold than tamper with the fidelity of the election or jeopardize it.

Mohammed added that both Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party lost the election as a result of their overconfidence and complacency.

He also 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.

Mohammed further said the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, 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.

He added that none of the opposition parties met any of the conditions stipulated for winning the presidential election going by the results. 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.”

Also 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.”

Mohammed slammed the opposition for continuously seeking to mislead the world by clutching over the issue of the IReV portal,  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.

”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.