Following a suit filed by the losers of the 2023 presidential election, the All Progressives Congress (APC) said on Friday that it was prepared to defend the mandate of its candidate, Bola Tinubu, in court.
Recall that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), have both requested permission from the Presidential Election Court (PEC) in Abuja to inspect the electoral materials as they seek to reclaim their allegedly stolen mandate.
The Labour Party candidate insisted that they have evidence to prove in court that the election on February 25th was rigged.
In response to Obi and Atiku’s claims, the APC Presidential Campaign Council announced on Friday that it had formed a legal team to defend the mandate given to the party and the President-elect, Tinubu, by Nigerians in last week’s hotly contested election.
WITHIN NIGERIA understands that the ruling party’s campaign council stated this during a press conference in Abuja on Friday, March 3, in response to the PDP and Labour Party candidates’ separate press conferences on Thursday.
Festus Keyamo, the APC PCC’s spokesperson, stated that he was a member of the party’s legal team.
Keyamo said;
As I am talking to you, we have constituted our legal team. We are going to court too. Let it not be that they are the only ones going to court. I am part of the legal team.
We Welcome PDP, Labour Party’s Decision To Go To Court
Dele Alake, the APC PCC’s Special Adviser on Media and Communication, also spoke out, saying the aggrieved presidential candidates’ decision to challenge Tinubu’s victory in court is a welcome idea.
He thanked the two oppositions for “opting for the rule of law,” after “the initial belligerent posture as they continue their baseless journey of chasing after a mirage.”
Alake said:
We must thank the two of them for finally opting for the rule of law as against the initial belligerent posture as they continue their baseless journey of chasing after a mirage.
We must say, however, that listening to both Atiku and Obi yesterday left us in the APC family confounded. We understand that there has been an orchestrated campaign by the PDP and the LP acolytes in the media to discredit the presidential election.
What we did not expect is that the two presidential candidates and, indeed, their political parties, would shamefully re-echo the puerile and unimaginative arguments that are being canvassed by political illiterates and mischief-makers who are crying wolf on social media.
He stated that the claim that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) did not use the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was false and an attempt to discredit Nigerians’ right to vote. Alake emphasized that the BVAS had accredited voters across Nigeria, including Atiku and Obi.
The APC chieftain argued further that the law did not support the complaint over the electronic transmission of results. Alake said;
Section 38 of the Electoral Acct 2022 referred to by the PDP, and the LP has nothing to do with the transmission of election results. Section 60, Sub-section 2 of the Act deals with the 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 any way 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.
He noted that the presidential election produced remarkable outcomes and defied conventions, adding that the deployment and use of BVAS was the only reason the elections had these strange outcomes and upsets in many cases.
The campaign council noted;
The loss of Katsina and Lagos to the PDP and the 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.
The same PDP that is trying to pull the wool across the face of Nigerians was the culprit in the Osun State governorship election. Did they try to do it this time, and it failed? Or did they do it in the areas they unexpectedly won? Did they have a grand plan to hack the INEC server if results were uploaded in real-time? Nigerians will soon find out.