…Assemblies legal team to battle LP, PDP in court
From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, has described as nonsensical the insinuation that time variation in uploading results caused changes in figures of last Saturday’s 2023 presidential election.
He argued that the claim that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) did not use the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was false.
Tinubu further maintained that those who voted across Nigeria, including candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku and his Labour Party (LP) counterpart, Peter Obi, were accredited with BVAS.
Speaking through the Media Directorate of the Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign (PCC) at a press conference held on Friday in Abuja, Tinubu described the 2023 presidential election as a watershed that produced unprecedented outcomes and defied conventions.
The APC PCC also revealed that it has assembled legal team to battle the candidates of both the LP and the PDP in the court of law, threatening to match them force for force.
In the speech read by Special adviser on media and communication of the APC PCC, Dele Alake, they emphatically stated that the complaint over the electronic transmission of the result is not supported by law.
“The claim that INEC did not use the BVAS is false. Those who voted across Nigeria, including Atiku and Obi, were accredited by BVAS. Save for bad losers that these two people have proven to be, we should rather be celebrating the tremendous improvement the use of BVAS has brought to our electoral proces. The complaint over the electronic transmission of the result is not supported by law.
“Section 38 of the Electoral Acct 2022 referred to by the PDP and LP has nothing to do with transmission of election results. Section 60, subsection 2 of the Act deals with transmission of results and it is at the discretion of INEC. The Act does not contain any mandatory provision regarding the transmission of results.
“In any case, the process of transmitting results from polling units, whether real-time, two days later or at any time, cannot in anyway change the results that have been announced right after the counting in the presence of the parties’ agents and to the hearing of the voters.
“It is, therefore, nonsensical to insinuate that time variation in uploading results would cause a change in the figures.
The 2023 Presidential election is a watershed as it produced unprecedented outcomes and defied conventions. The deployment and use of BVAS is the only reason the elections produced these strange outcomes and upsets in many cases.
“The loss of Katsina and Lagos to PDP and LP respectively were contrary to expectations. BVAS brought the intended credibility to voters’ accreditation such that many governors and well-established politicians lost elections in what should be safe bet areas.
“The era of ghost-voting and stuffing of ballot boxes is gone. As the experience in the last governorship election in Osun State has shown, over-voting would automatically lead to outright cancellation of the results of the polling units based on the provision of the new Electoral Act,” he said.
Evaluating the performance of the candidates, Alake said: “Contrary to the false claims of Atiku and Obi, the reasons for losing the elections were foretold. Besides the delusional expectations created during the campaigns to hoodwink the public, most PDP leaders knew their party had been decimated by Peter Obi. The South East and South South that were traditional strongholds of PDP constituted the core support base for the Labour Party.
“PDP went into this election without its limbs and lied to itself that it could win the race. It is worthy of note that Atiku also accepted this fact during his press conference on Thursday, when he lamented that his party’s votes in the South East and South South regions were carted away by the LP.
“For Obi, he would go down as Nigeria’s most dangerous and divisive politician. He elevated his well-known clannish mentality to a most unfortunate height by openly anchoring his campaign on religion and ethnicity. He presented himself as a poster boy for and a champion of our country’s fault lines.
“He took advantage of our youths whose expectations are fast paced, who are uninterested in excuses, and who were in search of a hero. He pumped up their sentiments and rode on their emotions while grandstanding as a saviour. It was a false pretence. Obi’s credentials are eternally stained as a former governor with no remarkable legacy,” he said.
