Tinubu Accepts Peter Obi’s Court Challenge Says 2023 Election Is Most Transparent Election In Nigerian History

Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress (APC) nominee for president, has stated that he is willing to defend the legitimacy of his election in court and that he accepts Mr. Peter Obi’s decision to do so.

In a statement released on Thursday in Abuja and signed by Mr. Bayo Onanuga, Director of Media and Publicity for the APC Presidential Campaign Council PCC, Tinubu expressed his position.

“We watched with dismay today’s press conference addressed by the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, where he made very odd and wild claims about the outcome of the just-concluded Presidential and National Assembly elections, an election in which he emerged as the second runner-up, according to the result declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission,” the statement reads in part.

“We applaud Mr. Obi’s determination to file a lawsuit as an aggrieved party to seek remedy if he is persuaded by the evidence of alleged electoral crimes he will submit before the tribunal.

“Going to court is the most honorable, statesmanlike, and civilized course of action to pursue, and it is a part of the election process. We applaud the choice. It is undoubtedly preferable to mobilizing supporters and igniting societal turmoil.

Before Mr. Obi goes to court, according to Tinubu, it is important to refute some particular assertions made in his press statement.

Contrary to Obi’s assertion, he added, it is not accurate to say that the election held on February 25th was not free and fair.

The election in 2023 would be one of the clearest and most tranquil in Nigerian history, according to Tinubu.

He claimed that the process’ credibility allowed Mr. Obi’s Labour Party to receive more than six million votes than predicted, defying the pre-election projection.

“The Labour Party and Mr. Obi astonished the oddsmakers by winning in Lagos State, Nasarawa, Plateau, Delta, and Edo, where there are current APC or PDP governors. Such governors have a strong political infrastructure. Obi’s victory confirms the validity of the voting process. In those states, the majority of the incumbent governors ran for election to the Senate but were defeated by obscure Labour Party candidates.

In addition, all five South East states that were governed by the APGA, PDP, or APC were won by the Labour Party.

By implying that the election was only legitimate in the states and regions where his party won, the Labour Party presidential candidate, in our opinion, exposed himself to public ridicule.

“We need us to forewarn Mr. Obi, that when he gets to court he should be prepared to tell the world how his party won over 90% of votes in his region of South East while other parties got almost nothing. We have evidence of voter suppression, intimidation, and harassment in the South East especially of those who came out to vote for our party.

“Also when Mr. Obi gets to court, he will have to convince the court with his allegation of rigging in over 40,000 polling units across the country, especially in North West and North East where his party had no party agents and did not sign results sheets as required by law. We assume that the Labour Party will enlist PDP agents to prove its fraud claims since it is an affiliate of PDP.

“We want to state again for the umpteenth time that Mr. Obi didn’t win the presidential election and could not have won under any circumstances. This is because he had no path to winning a national election in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society like Nigeria where a candidate running in a national election must appeal to the cross-section of our pluralistic society.

“Mr. Obi anchored his presidential campaign on the failed strategy of ethnicity and religion, the divisive and dangerous politics that has hobbled the progress of our country for decades.

“Nigerians simply rejected an ethnic and religious bigot through their ballots.

“Mr. Obi all through his campaign presented himself as the candidate of the Christians and the Church, who wanted to help ‘take back their country” from the Nigerian Muslims.

“His campaign also ran on the engine of ethnicity, inflaming strong Igbo sentiments. He also sought to cash in on the supposed youth discontent in Nigeria, as fuelled by the ENDSARS protest in 2020.

“While Labour Party positioned its candidate as the harvester of the youth votes, its planners forgot that Nigeria does not have a homogeneous and monolithic youth population that can deliver bloc vote to any candidate.

“All the major parties that contested the election also have strong youth appeal and supporters.

*The lesson in Mr. Obi’s defeat in the election is that no politician in Nigeria can win a presidential race by being a sectional and an anointed candidate of any religion.

“Mr. Obi and his party knew why they failed. They knew they had no path to victory with their negative and dangerous campaign.

“We owe Labour Party and Peter Obi the blunt truth: They failed in the election. No amount of red-herring and misinformation about the election and the outcome can obliterate this reality”, the APC PCC added.