The Federal Government has urged the opposition parties in the country to stop griping over the 2023 presidential election, saying they know very well that they deserve to lose the election because of their overconfidence and complacency.

The Federal Government said the opposition parties lost the February 25 presidential election woefully, noting that President Muhammadu Buhari’s analysis on the reasons for their loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible.

The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said this via a statement issued on Sunday, April 30, by his Special Assistant on Media, Segun Adeyemi.

Mohammed said Buhari deserves accolades for delivering the best election in Nigeria’s history, adding that the reactions to the President’s comments by the opposition parties have shown they are “shameless sore losers”.

“President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his billing by delivering a free, fair, and credible election, and his legacy is assured. The President would rather lose his state and many of his party’s strongholds than tamper with the fidelity of the election, and that is why he provided a level playing field for all parties,” the minister stated.

He said the opposition’s overconfidence going into the 2023 presidential election stemmed in part from the social media propaganda as well as “faulty and procured” opinion polls, which were apparently meant to hoodwink their foreign backers and a section of the international media into uncritically reporting that they were coasting home to victory.

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Mohammed said Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) won the presidential election fair and square, clinching the majority of the votes cast and surpassing the constitutionally-stipulated 25 per cent of votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of all the states in the federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).

“Going by the results, none of the opposition parties met any of the conditions stipulated for winning the presidential election. They didn’t even come close, in spite of their pre-election grandstanding.

“They keep leaning on some international observers to justify their fraudulent claim that the election was rigged. They conveniently forgot what Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the revered US diplomat who co-led the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) International Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said: that the APC candidate undoubtedly won the polls.

“They also forgot that the African Union Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said the atmosphere was generally calm and peaceful in 95 per cent of the polling units visited,” he said.

The minister added that it is on the strength of these reports that many nations, including the United States and the United Kingdom, wasted no time in congratulating Tinubu.

Mohammed further slammed the opposition parties for continuously seeking to mislead the world by saying the results were not immediately uploaded onto the IReV portal, “as if the portal has any role to play in the collation of results”.

“The opposition’s insinuation that the failure to immediately upload the result of the presidential election onto IReV affected the credibility of the election is a fraud. It is an act of blackmail and deceit by desperate individuals.

“The opposition Labour Party, in particular, will go down in the history books as the first-ever distant third-place finisher in a presidential election anywhere to have bold-facedly claimed victory,” Mohammed noted.

The Star