Two of the candidates who lost in Saturday’s presidential election have declared that they would challenge the outcome of the results of the polls in court.
They are the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and his Labour Party (LP) counterpart, Peter Obi.
They made their intentions known shortly after the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu declared Bola Tinubu as president-elect on the platform of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
According to the PDP, Tinubu’s victory as “a grave injustice which will not stand.”
Spokesman and Director Public Affairs of the PDP Presidential Campaign Committee, Senator Dino Melaye, vin a terse statement on Wednesday evening, said there will be no going back on the battle to retrieve the mandate which he called a “stolen one.”
He said “A clarion call on all Atiku’s supporters all over the world not to be perturbed. Weeping may tarry till night but joy cometh in the morning.
“This grave injustice shall not stand. The battle to retrieve our stolen mandate is a battle of no retreat, no surrender. We shall overcome,” he said.
Obi toed the path of the PDP also when he said he would contest Tinubu’s victory through legal and peaceful means.
He made the declaration on Wednesday in Abuja at a press conference addressed by his running mate, Senator Datti Baba-Ahmed.
“On behalf of our presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, I address you all and indeed all Nigerians on the current situation in the country following the announcement of the purported result of the presidential election held on Saturday, February 25th 2023.
“Please be assured of our determination to fight the injustice that has been perpetrated on Nigerians through all legal and peaceful means. It is our position that the purported result did not meet the minimum criteria of a transparent, free and fair election,” Baba-Ahmed said.
He, however, thanked all Nigerians for their belief in them and for coming out en masse to vote for the Labour Party and for the cause they believed in, which he said was the birth of a new Nigeria.
In a separate development, the National Chairman of NNPP, Rufai Alkali, said the INEC had taken the country back to the pre-2015 era with the way it conducted the election.
He told a press conference in Abuja on Wednesday that “We are deeply concerned that going by what had happened on election day, the election umpire has taken our country back to the pre-2015 era of election where everything goes: where voters were deliberately and systematically disenfranchised; where ballot box snatching and ballot box stuffing was the norm; where voter suppression was widespread; where violence and vote-buying were the main deciding factors of the outcome of elections; where security agents openly take side with the ruling party and participate actively in rigging elections,” he said.
Alkali said his party observed that “INEC deliberately undermined the NNPP in the process, allowed campaign on election day by the president and others; voter suppression, vote-buying, BVAS failure and over-voting, lying about IReV sever and election marred by unprecedented violence.”
He, on behalf of the NNPP, therefore, demandednthe cancellation of the poll.
