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Taiwo Amodu-Abuja
President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu has said he was prepared to meet the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, in court.
Tinubu’s declaration was on the heels of the LP candidate’s claim at a press briefing that he believed he won the election but was shortchanged.
Peter Obi also vowed to challenge the outcome of the process in Court.
Reacting through Bayo Onanuga, Director, Media & Publicity of APC Presidential Campaign Council, Tinubu said, “welcome the decision of Mr. Obi to seek redress in court as an aggrieved party if he is convinced of the evidence of electoral frauds he will present before the tribunal as alleged.
“Going to court is part of the electoral process and it is the most decent, statesmanlike, and civilised course of action to take. We salute the decision. It is surely better than calling supporters to the streets and instigating social unrest. “
The president expressed strong reservations about the LP candidate’s claim that the election was rigged when he accepted the outcome in states that he won, some with sitting governors of the ruling All Progressives Congress and the main opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party.
The statement read in part:” Before Mr. Obi goes to court, we consider it necessary to challenge some specific claims in his press address, “Contrary to his statement, it is not true that the election held on 25 February was not free and fair.
“The 2023 election is one of the most transparent and peaceful elections in the history of Nigeria. The process was credible and made it possible for Mr. Obi’s Labour Party to record the over six million votes it got, contrary to the pre-election forecast.
“That Labour Party and Mr. Obi surprised bookmakers by winning in Lagos State, Nasarawa, Plateau, Delta and Edo where there are sitting governors of the All Progressives Congress or the Peoples Democratic Party. Those governors have entrenched political machinery. That Obi won attests to the credibility of the election process. In those states, most of the sitting governors contested elections to go to the Senate and lost to little-known candidates of the Labour Party.
“The Labour Party also swept the entire five South East states under the control of either APGA, PDP or APC.
“We believe that the Labour Party Presidential Candidate contradicted himself and exposed himself to public ridicule by suggesting that the election was only credible in states and places his party won.
“We need us to forewarn Mr. Obi, that when he gets to court, he should be prepared to tell the world how his party won over 90% of votes in his region of South East while other parties got almost nothing. We have evidence of voter suppression, intimidation and harassment in South East, especially of those who came out to vote for our party.
“Also when Mr. Obi gets to court, he will have to convince the court with his allegation of rigging in over 40,000 polling units across the country, especially in North West and North East where his party had no party agents and did not sign result sheets as required by law. We assume that Labour Party will enlist PDP agents to prove its fraud claims since it is an affiliate of PDP.
“We want to state again for the umpteenth time that Mr. Obi didn’t win the presidential election and could not have won under any circumstances. This is because he had no path to winning a national election in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like Nigeria, where a candidate running in a national election must appeal to the cross-section of our pluralistic society.
“Mr. Obi anchored his presidential campaign on the failed strategy of ethnicity and religion, the divisive and dangerous politics that has hobbled the progress of our country for decades.
“Nigerians simply rejected an ethnic and religious bigot through their ballots.
“Mr. Obi all through his campaign presented himself as the candidate of the Christians and the Church, who wanted to help ‘take back their country” from the Nigerian Muslims.
“His campaign also ran on the engine of ethnicity, inflaming strong Igbo sentiments. He also sought to cash in on the supposed youth discontent in Nigeria, as fuelled by the ENDSARS protest in 2020.
“While Labour Party positioned its candidate as the harvester of the youth votes, its planners forgot that Nigeria does not have a homogeneous and monolithic youth population that can deliver bloc vote to any candidate.
All the major parties that contested the election also have strong youth appeal and supporters.
The lesson in Mr. Obi’s defeat in the election is that no politician in Nigeria can win a presidential race by being a sectional and an anointed candidate of any religion. “
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