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Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed
The Federal Government has described the opposition attacking President Muhammadu Buhari over his recent comment on the 2023 Presidential elections as “shameless sore losers”.
In a statement issued on Sunday, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said the President’s analysis of the reasons for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 elections is incontrovertible.
The statement was made available to newsmen in Abuja by Mr Segun Adeyemi, the Special Assistant to the President (Media), in the Office of the Minister.
The minister reiterated the position of the President that the opposition in the 2023 presidential election loss in the poll due to their overconfidence, complacency and bad tactical moves.
“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.
“These 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 said
Mohammed advised the opposition to stop their endless griping over the polls which they lost, adding the president deserves accolades for delivering the best election in Nigeria’s history.
“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.
According to Mohammed, the presidential candidate of the APC, Bola Tinubu, won the presidential election fair and square, clinching the majority of the votes cast.
He added that Tinubu surpassed the constitutionally stipulated 25 per cent 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 did not 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,” he said.
Mohammed referred the opposition to the conclusion by Mr Johnnie Carson, the revered US diplomat, that the APC candidate “undoubtedly won the polls”.
Carson, according to the minister, co-led the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) International Election Observation Mission to Nigeria.
”They also forgot that the African Union Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said the atmosphere was generally calm and peaceful in 95 per cent 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,” he said.
The minister slammed the opposition for continuously seeking to mislead the world by clutching at the weak straw that results were not immediately uploaded onto the IReV Portal.
He stressed that the portal had no role to play in the collation of election 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.
