Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed has again mocked the opposition parties and their Presidential candidates, insisting they lost the 2023 Presidential election woefully to the President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
Alhaji Mohammed’s reaction followed the oppositions’ criticism of President Muhammadu Buhari’s comment that a combination of “overconfidence, false hope, complacency, and bad tactics” made Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, LP, lose the Presidential election.
The opposition parties had in the response claimed that the election was rigged in favour of the APC.
The Minister, in a statement signed by his Special Assistant, Segun Adeyemi, on Sunday, told the opposition parties to desist from “bleating” over the outcome of the 2023 Presidential election.
The statement quoted Alhaji Mohammed as saying the opposition parties should stop their “endless griping” over the election.
He said the opposition parties lost the presidential poll woefully and that Buhari’s “analysis” of the election is accurate.
“President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his billing by delivering a free, fair and credible election, and his legacy is assured,” Mohammed said.
“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.”
The minister said the oppositions’ overconfidence and false hope, ahead of the elections was inspired by social media propaganda and opinion polls “procured” 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 to the ravine of defeat”.
“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,” he said.
“They 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 it is on the strength of these assessments that many nations, including the US and the UK, “wasted no time in congratulating” Tinubu.
“The oppositions’ 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,” he said.
”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.”