FG Urges Opposition to Stop Grieving over Presidential Election Defeat

Olawale Ajimotokan in Abuja

The federal government has chided the opposition as a shameless sore losers saying they should let go and stop mourning over the 2023 presidential election which they lost woefully.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed delivered the chastening message in a statement Sunday. He said the opposition knew they deserved to lose the election because of their overconfidence and complacency.

He also descended on the Labour Party as the first-ever distant third-place finisher in a presidential election anywhere in the

world to have brazenly claimed victory.

The minister said President Muhammadu Buhari deserves nothing but accolades for delivering undoubtedly the best election in Nigeria’s history.

He noted the President’s analysis on the reasons for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible, adding that the reaction to his comments by the opposition has shown that they are unrepentant 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 said.

The minister lashed the opposition for premising their overconfidence on faulty opinion polls and overdose of social media propaganda meant to hoodwink their foreign backers and the international media that they were coasting home to victory, when in reality they were indeed heading into the ravine of defeat.

He insisted the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu, won the presidential election fair and square, clinching the majority of the votes cast and surpassing 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 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. 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 per cent of the polling units visited,” Mohamed said.

He averred that it was on the basis those reports that many nations, including the US and the UK, wasted no time in congratulating the APC candidate as the president-elect.

Mohammed similarly cast aspersion on the opposition for irredeemably misleading the world by clutching at the weak straw that results were not immediately

uploaded onto the IReV Portal, noting the portal does not play any role in the collation of 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.