TheCable

Lai Mohammed, minister of information and culture, has asked opposition parties to desist from “bleating” about the outcome of the presidential election.

While speaking on Thursday at a meeting with APC governors in Abuja, President Muhammadu Buhari said while the All Progressives Congress (APC) was working hard to retain the presidency, opposition parties were basking in the euphoria of “false hope”.

He said a combination of “overconfidence, complacency, and bad tactical moves” made Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) lose to President-elect Bola Tinubu.

The opposition parties reacted by criticising the president’s comment, claiming that the election was rigged in favour of the APC.

In a statement issued on Sunday, Segun Adeyemi, special assistant to the minister, quoted him as saying that the opposition parties should stop their “endless griping” over the election.

The minister said the opposition parties lost the presidential poll woefully and that Buhari’s “analysis” of the election is accurate.

“President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his billing by delivering a free, fair and credible election, and his legacy is assured,” Mohammed said.

“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 opposition’s overconfidence ahead of the elections was inspired by social media propaganda and opinion polls “procured” to “hoodwink their foreign backers and a section of the international media into uncritically reporting that they were coasting home to victory when they were indeed heading into the ravine of defeat”.

“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,” he said.

“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.

“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.”

The minister said it is on the strength of the reports that many nations, including the US and the UK, “wasted no time in congratulating” Tinubu.

“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,” he said.

”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.”