ABUJA, Nigeria – Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed, has advised the opposition to stop their endless griping over the 2023 presidential election which “they lost woefully”, saying they know very well that they deserve to lose the election because of their overconfidence and complacency.
Speaking in Abuja on Sunday, April 30, 2023, the minister said that President Muhammadu Buhari delivered the best election in Nigeria’s history and deserves nothing but accolades for his efforts.
“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,” Mr Mohammed said.
He said 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.
The minister said the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed 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 despite their pre-election grandstanding,” Mr Mohammed said.
He criticised 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, as if the portal has any role in collating 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,” 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,” he added.
In conclusion, the minister urged the opposition to accept the election’s outcome and work with the government to move the nation forward.
