For allegedly inciting people to violence over the outcome of the February 25 Presidential poll, the Minister of Information and Culture, Mr Lai Mohammed, says the Presidential Candidate of the Labour Party, Mr Peter Obi, has committed treason.
“Obi and his Vice, Datti Ahmed cannot be threatening Nigerians that if the President-elect, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) is sworn in on May 29, it will be the end of democracy in Nigeria.
“This is treason. You cannot be inviting insurrection, and this is what they are doing. Obi’s statement is that of a desperate person, he is not a democrat that he claimed to be.
“A democrat should not believe in democracy only when he wins election,” Persecondnews quotes the information minister as saying.
Mohammed spoke in Washington DC during respective interactions with some international media organizations.
According to the minister, it was wrong for Obi in one breath to seek redress in court over the outcome of the polls and in another breath incite people to violence.
Speaking in defense of the 2023 elections which had been rejected by five presidential candidates as flawed, the minister said in spite of challenging the election results in court, he speculated that there was “no pathway to victory” for either Obi or Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
For the minister, both Obi and Atiku failed to meet the constitutional requirements to be declared as president.
“The constitution has stringent criteria for anybody who wants to be president of the country.
“Not only must he has the plurality of vote cast in an election, but he must also have scored one-quarter of votes cast in at least 25 states.
“Only the President-elect met the criteria by scoring 8.79 million votes and having one-quarter of all the vote cast in 29 states of the federation,” Mohammed said.
He recalled that Atiku who came second with 6.9 million votes was only able to make one-quarter of the votes cast in 21 states while Obi came third with 5.8 million votes but won only one-quarter of the votes cast in 15 states.
Mohammed stressed: “You cannot win an election in a poll where you came to a distant third position and failed to meet constitutional requirements.
“Peter Obi, while complaining of fraud has not disowned his victory in Lagos.”
On why he flew to the U.S., Mohammed said he needed to correct what he called “the negative narratives being promoted by naysayers and opposition on the election.”
The minister accused opposition parties of alleging fraud and calling for the cancellation of the elections and the constitution of an interim government following their defeat at the polls.
“We have come here to balance that skewed narratives and to tell the world unambiguously that the just concluded general election in Nigeria is the fairest, most transparent, and authentic in the history of Nigeria.
“The election is the fairest and most credible because of the introduction of the Bimodal Voters Verification System (BVAS) which I regard as a game changer.
“BVAS, during the polls, worked 97 percent giving unparalleled credibility to the elections,” Mohammed said.
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