Chief Spokesman for the All Progressives Congress presidential campaign council, Festus Keyamo, has admonished the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, to stop playing the victim despite knowing the president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, was the victor.
Keyamo’s warning was a reaction to Obi’s claim that he was robbed of his mandate at a world press conference held in Abuja on Thursday.
Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes to defeat his closest rivals, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party and Labour Party’s Peter Obi by 6,984,520 and 6,101,533 votes respectively.
But an emotional Obi told newsmen that the exercise did not meet the criteria for a free and credible election.
This is even as the former Anambra State governor vowed to explore legal and peaceful means to reclaim its mandate.
Keyamo, however, countered Obi’s argument, saying he is attempting to use certain irregularities outside his strongholds as proof of election rigging when there are tons of evidence of how his supporters engaged in thuggery, violence and outright falsification of figures circulating all over social media.
He pretends to play the victim, whereas he is the greatest culprit in this game of brickbats. Mr. Peter Obi is always quick to cite some isolated incidents of irregularities outside his strongholds that could not have substantially affected the outcome of the results in those areas, whereas he deliberately fails to comment on tons and tons of evidence circulating everywhere wherein his supporters in his strongholds engaged in thuggery, hooliganism, violence and outright falsification of figures against our party and our supporters.
Obi knows he could not have won having played the most divisive religious politics in our history and the pattern of the votes clearly show that; Obi knows he could not have won having broken out as a fragment of the main opposition, the PDP and all he could hope for was to harvest a portion of the votes of PDP in a section of the country and the results do not tell a lie; Mr. Obi knows he could not have won, when he presented himself as a tribal candidate and was only campaigning in settlements of his tribesmen in other States outside the South East instead of appealing to all and sundry.
Obi knows he could not have won having joined the Labour Party few months ago and bought the ticket of the Party without valid Primaries and thereby polarised his party; Mr. Peter Obi knows he did not win because he did not even fulfill the minimum requirement of our constitution which requires a spread of 25 per cent in two-thirds of the States of the Federation. He did not come even close. With his divisive rhetorics, he could not have come close.
It is also ludicrous that Mr. Peter Obi is laying claim to victory along with his new-found partner, the PDP that is also laying claim to victory. I tweeted this morning, thus: ‘This is the first time in my entire life that I am seeing people who came 2nd and 3rd in an exam both claiming they took first and then agreeing to protest together to the examiner to record that both of them took first, yet they are not seeing the contradiction in their actions. We stand by that comment.
According to him, the president-elect has extended a hand of fellowship to his defeated opponents, including Obi to join hands with him in nation-building as a committed patriot instead of engaging in crass grandstanding.
