Lai Mohammed in US, engages media on 2023 elections, says Peter Obi committed treasonable felony

The Federal Government has cautioned the candidate of the Labour Party in the 25 February presidential election, Mr Peter Obi to desist from inciting people to violence over the outcomes of the elections.

The warning was issued by Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed in Washington DC, during his official engagements with some international media organizations in the United States of America.

The minister, who is currently in Washington DC to meet with international media organisations and Think tanks on the just-concluded 2023 elections has so far engaged respectively with the Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press and Foreign Policy Magazine.

During the respective interactions with the media organizations, the minister said it was wrong for Obi in one breadth to seek redress in court over the outcome of the polls and in another breadth 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 a democrat that he claimed to be.

“A democrat should not believe in democracy only when he wins election,” he said.

The minister said in challenging the election results, there was no pathway to victory for either Obi and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

According to the minister, both Obi and Atiku failed to meet the constitutional requirements to be declared as president.

He said President Muhammadu Buhari has delivered on his pledge to leave behind a legacy of free, fair and credible elections in the conduct of 2023 polls.

Mohammed said in fulfilment of the President’s pledge to restore sanity to the electoral process, he resolved that he would not confer a special advantage on any political party, including the ruling APC, during the election.

He said during the past elections, the President ensured that nobody used the security agencies to rig the election in his favour but created a level-playing ground for the elections to take place.

“A proof of this resolution is that the President’s party lost the presidential election in Katsina, his home state.

“Equally, the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, lost in his state, Lagos, while the Chairman of the party, Abdullahi Adamu, lost in Nasarawa state to the Labour Party.

“The Director-General of the Campaign Organisation of our party also lost to PDP in Plateau State.

“Nothing gives this election more credence than those facts because there was no rigging in states where our bigwigs come from,” he said.

The minister added that APC lost in the four states with the highest number of votes in the elections – Katsina, Kano, Kaduna and Lagos even when they were the ruling party’s controlled states.

Mohammed said the allegations of fraud being bandied by the opposition and naysayers did not add up.

According to the minister, the controversy was generated because of the inability of INEC to upload the results of the Presidential election in real time.

He said the controversy was absolutely unnecessary though it had been the fulcrum of the argument of the naysayers that elections were flawed.

INEC had come under fire over its inability to upload results immediately on its Result Viewing portal during the presidential and National Assembly elections.

Mohammed, however, said the conclusion by the opposition and naysayers was based on ignorance of the role and functions of IREV.

He said IREV, a platform whereby election results at the polling level are uploaded, was not a tool for the collation of elections or to transmit results electronically.

“Under our laws today, management of election results is manual and the court has ruled that INEC has the exclusive right to determine the mode of election, its collation and transmission.

“What happened on the 25th of February was that INEC observed that the results of the Presidential elections were not being viewed.

“INEC, suspecting a cyber-attack, withheld the uploading of the results in order to preserve the integrity of the data.

“It immediately proceeded to float an alternative platform while asking its technicians to investigate what happened to its original portal,” he said.

The minister explained further that it took about 9pm for the alternative portal to start working.

He said as soon as the original portal started working, the results were viewed from the two platforms.

“It is unfortunate that this is what the opposition are relying on to say the elections were rigged.

“So far, none of the political parties has come out to say that what is on Form EC8A is different from what was uploaded on IREV,” he added.