The Labour Party’s Mr. Peter Obi has been warned by the Federal Government not to incite violence in response to the results of the presidential election.
According to the News Agency of Nigeria, the warning was given by the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in Washington, DC, during formal interactions with a few international media outlets over the recently finished 2023 elections.
The Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press, and Foreign Policy Magazine have all been contacted by the ministry thus far.
Mohammed stated during the discussions with the media organizations that it was improper for Obi to call for violence on one hand while also seeking legal recourse over the election results on the other.
“Obi and his vice, Datti Ahmed, cannot be threatening Nigerians that if the President-elect, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress is sworn in on May 29, it will be the end of democracy in Nigeria. This is treason. You cannot be inviting insurrection, and this is what they are doing.
“Obi’s statement is that of a desperate person, he is not the democrat that he claimed to be.
“A democrat should not believe in democracy only when he wins the election,” he said.
The minister claimed that neither Obi nor Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, had a chance of winning if the election results were challenged.
The minister claimed that neither Obi nor Atiku fulfilled the qualifications outlined in the constitution to be designated the next president.
“The constitution has stringent criteria for anybody who wants to be president of the country.
“Not only must he have the plurality of votes cast in an election, but he must also have scored one-quarter of votes cast in at least 25 states.
“Only the president-elect met the criteria by scoring 8.79 million votes and having one-quarter of all the votes cast in 29 states of the federation,” he said.
According to the minister, Atiku, who received 6.9 million votes and finished in a distant second place, received barely 25% of the ballots cast across 21 states.
He claimed that despite receiving 5.8 million votes, Obi only received 25% of the total votes cast across 15 states.
The minister stated,
“You cannot win an election in a vote if you came in third place and did not adhere to constitutional standards.”