The Federal Government of Nigeria has expressed its displeasure with the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, for his potentially inflammatory rhetoric related to the 2023 presidential election.
During official engagements with some international media organisations in Washington DC, Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed pointed out that inciting people to violence is not something that should be done alongside pursuing legal redress through the court system.
The minister engaged with notable media organisations such as The Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press, and Foreign Policy Magazine.
“Obi and his Vice, Datti Ahmed, cannot be threatening Nigerians that if the President-elect, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress is sworn in on May 29, it will be the end of democracy in Nigeria. This is treason. You cannot be inviting insurgency, 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,” Mohammed stated.
The minister affirmed that the election results were not in dispute and there was no route of success for Obi or Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the People’s Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.
The minister stated that neither Obi nor Atiku met the constitutional criteria for being named president.
“According to the constitution, a person must acquire one-quarter of votes cast in 25 states and must have achieved the most votes with a plurality. It was emphasised that the current president-elect attained 8.79 million votes and collected one-quarter of all the votes cast in 29 states, while Atiku only received 6.9 million votes and fulfilled only one-quarter of votes cast in 21 states; Obi came third collecting 5.8m votes with no fulfilment of one-quarter of all the votes cast. Furthermore, it was declared that you can’t win when you place at a such far distance behind the first loser whilst not meeting constitutional requirements,” Lai Mohammed added.
