The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has berated opposition parties over their reaction to President Muhammadu Buhari’s analysis of the 2023 presidential election.
He advised the aggrieved parties to stop their endless complaint over the polls.
Speaking via a statement issued on Sunday, Mohammed argued that the analysis of President Muhammadu Buhari on the reason for the opposition’s loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible.
He said the opposition lost the election because of their overconfidence and complacency.
The Minister insisted that President should be praised for delivering the best election in Nigeria’s history, adding that ”the tempestuous but predictable reaction to the President’s comments by the opposition has shown them for what they are: shameless sore 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.”
The Minister said the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju 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, in spite of their pre-election grandstanding.
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.
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.