2023: FG warns Peter Obi, Datti Baba-Ahmed against incitement of violence
The federal government has sent message of warning to the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, LP, Peter Obi and his running mate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, to stop inciting Nigerians to violence over the results of the February 25 presidential elections.
The minister of information and culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed made this revelation in Washington DC while meeting with some international media organizations and Think-tanks on the elections.
The minister said it’s wrong for Obi to take the election issue to court and at the same time incite people to violence.
“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 the democrat that he claimed to be. A democrat should not believe in democracy only when he wins the election,” he said.
The minister said Obi and the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party PDP, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar have failed to meet up the constitutional requirements to be announced the winner of the election.
“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, 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,” he said
The minister recalled that Atiku polled 6.9 million votes and came second, Obi gathered 5.8 million votes to come third but won only one-quarter of votes cast in 15 states.
“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,” he said.
“We have come here to balance that skewed narratives and to tell the world unambiguously that the just concluded general elections in Nigeria is the fairest, most transparent and authentic in the history of Nigeria. The election is the fairest and credible because of the introduction of the Bimodal Voters Verification System (BVAS) which I regard as a game changer.”
