By The Labour Party’s Mr. Peter Obi has been warned by the Federal Government not to incite violence in response to the results of the presidential elections.
During his official meetings with a few international media organizations in Washington, DC, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, issued the warning.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the minister is in Washington to discuss the recently concluded 2023 elections with foreign media outlets and think tanks.
Also, according to NAN, the minister has so far communicated with the “Washington Post,” “Voice of America,” “Associated Press,” and “Foreign Policy Magazine” in that order.
The minister stated during several meetings with the media outlets that it was improper for Obi to call for violence on one hand while simultaneously seeking legal recourse over the election results on the other.
“Obi and his vice, Datti Ahmed, cannot warn Nigerians that the country’s democracy will end if Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is inaugurated as president on May 29.
It is treason. You can’t encourage rebellion, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.
“Obi is not the democrat he claimed to be; his statement is that of a desperate guy.
A Democrat shouldn’t just have faith in democracy after winning an election, he argued.
The minister claimed that neither Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the PDP candidate for president, nor Obi had any chance of winning if the poll results were challenged (PDP).
Both Obi and Atiku, in the minister’s opinion, fell short of fulfilling the constitutional prerequisites for declaration as president.
“The constitution lays out strict requirements for anyone wishing to serve as president of the nation.
In addition to receiving the majority of votes cast in an election, a candidate must also receive one-fourth of the votes cast in at least 25 states.
Only the President-elect, who received 8.79 million votes and received one-quarter of all ballots cast throughout 29 states of the union, met the requirements, he claimed.
According to the minister, Atiku, who received 6.9 million votes and finished in a distant second place, received barely 25% of the ballots cast across 21 states.
He claimed that despite receiving 5.8 million votes, Obi only received 25% of the total votes cast across 15 states.
You cannot win an election in a poll where you finished in a distant third place and did not match the conditions set forth by the Constitution.
While claiming fraud, Peter Obi has not renounced his victory in Lagos, the man stated.
The minister explained his purpose for visiting the country, saying it was to refute the unfavorable accounts of the election being spread by skeptics and opponents.
The opposition, he claimed, had lost the election and was now accusing there had been fraud and demanding its annulment and constitution of the interim government.
“We have come here to counterbalance those distorted narratives and to clearly state that the just ended general elections in Nigeria were the most fair, transparent, and authentic in Nigerian history.
“The implementation of the Bimodal Voters Verification System (BVAS), which I see as a game changer, had helped to weed out ghost and illegal voters, eliminate duplicate voting, and return sanity to the elections, made the election the most credible and fair.
The minister claimed that BVAS operated 97% of the time throughout the elections, providing them unmatched legitimacy based on the INEC report.
