Lai Mohammed, the minister of information and culture, has urged the opposition to stop complaining nonstop about the 2023 presidential election, which they utterly failed to win.
Lai Mohammed claimed in a statement he released on Sunday that President Muhammadu Buhari's analysis of the factors contributing to the opposition's defeat in the 2023 elections was unquestionable.
He claimed that the opposition's overconfidence and complacency contributed to their loss of the election.
He stated that the President deserves nothing but applause for delivering undoubtedly the 'best election in Nigeria’s history,' adding that â€the tempestuous but predictable reaction to the President’s comments by the opposition has shown them for what they are: shameless sore losersâ€.
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.
Mohammed asserted that the opposition's overconfidence leading up to the election was partly caused by a blitzkrieg of social media propaganda and faulty and procured opinion polls that were designed to deceive their foreign backers and a portion of the international media into erroneously reporting that they were coasting to victory when in reality they were heading into the ravine of defeat.
According to the Minister, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate for president, won the election with a majority of the votes cast and more than the 25% threshold required by the constitution in each of at least two-thirds of 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.
â€They (the 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.
â€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,†he said, adding that 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.
Mohammed criticized the opposition for consistently trying to deceive the public by clinging to the thin pretense that results weren't immediately uploaded to the IReV Portal, as if the portal had any bearing on 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.
â€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.