The President-Elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, has constituted a team of legal experts to defend his mandate in the recently held presidential poll.
Spokesperson of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council (APC PCC), Mr. Festus Keyamo made this known at a press conference held at the campaign headquarters of the APC in Abuja.
Though Keyamo did not disclose the identity of those on the team, he disclosed that the team included him and several senior advocates who have expressed readiness to volunteer their services.
Keyamo, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) further stated that the legal team had concluded arrangement to file a cross petition against the suit being instituted by the opposition Labour Party and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) aimed at ensuring the cancellation of the votes scored by the LP in the entire South East geopolitical zone of the country.
Alleging that the poll in the South East geopolitical zone was characterised by votes rigging and voter intimidation, he claimed that he had evidence at his possession whereby the entire results of a particular ward was handwritten by an unidentified individual.
Tinubu’s Special Adviser on Media and Communication, Mr. Dele Alake, faulted the claim by the presidential candidates of the LP and PDP, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) did not use the BVAS during the presidential poll.
He said, “Those who voted across Nigeria, including Atiku and Obi, were accredited by BVAS. Save for bad losers that these two people have proven to be, we should rather be celebrating the tremendous improvement the use of BVAS has brought to our electoral process.
“Section 38 of the Electoral Acct 2022 referred to by the PDP and LP has nothing to do with transmission of election results. Section 60, subsection 2 of the Act deals with 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 anyway 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. The 2023 Presidential election is a watershed as it produced unprecedented outcomes and defied conventions. The deployment and use of BVAS is the only reason the elections produced these strange outcomes and upsets in many cases.”
Continuing, he argued: “The loss of Katsina and Lagos to PDP and 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.
“Contrary to the false claims of Atiku and Obi, the reasons for losing the elections were foretold. Besides the delusional expectations created during the campaigns to hoodwink the public, most PDP leaders knew their party had been decimated by Mr. Obi.
“The South-East and South-South that were traditional strongholds of PDP constituted the core support base for the Labour Party. PDP went into this election without its limbs and lied to itself that it could win the race.
“It is worthy of note that Atiku also accepted this fact during his press conference yesterday, when he lamented that his party’s votes in the South East and South South regions were carted away by the LP.
“The PDP also found itself in No.3 in Kano, with a former member, Kwankwaso running away with over 900, 000 votes.
“How far could the PDP have gone with what was left of it? Not so far as the results of the elections have shown. The members of G5 were key leaders of the party who had substantial political influence. They also went away with their own pound of flesh, leaving a crippled PDP to scavenge for crumps of votes.
“For Obi, he would go down as Nigeria’s most dangerous and divisive politician. He elevated his well-known clannish mentality to a most unfortunate height by openly anchoring his campaign on religion and ethnicity.
“He presented himself as a poster boy for and a champion of our country’s fault lines. He took advantage of our youths whose expectations are fast paced, who are uninterested in excuses, and who were in search of a hero.
“He pumped up their sentiments and rode on their emotions while grandstanding as a saviour. It was a false pretence. Obi’s credentials are eternally stained as a former governor with no remarkable legacy.
“Not a few of our youths thought Peter Obi looked like the leader they wanted and many of them could not tolerate any form of scrutiny of their newfound hero. They chose willfully to canonise him while insisting no one should ask questions.
“The combination of the disgruntled youths, the ethnic champions, and commercial clerics were the reason Obi thought he could win a presidential election in Nigeria. Such illogic is not strange to the Labour Party.
“If Labour Party could not fill up its quota for polling booth agents with a shortfall of over 40, 000, how did it intend to compete with political parties like APC and PDP? It would be interesting to see what evidence of rigging LP will present before the court when the party could not appoint agents to monitor nearly a quarter of the venues of election.
“As we look forward to an encounter with both the PDP and LP at the court, we want to enjoin the two of them to pursue their grievances with decorum. They should encourage their members, supporters, ethnic and religious consultants to follow the path of the rule of law.
“We note that both Atiku and Obi are claiming victory, wouldn’t it make sense for them to agree who the actual winner is before challenging APC in court? Meanwhile, the APC train has left the station as we continue our effort to make Nigeria better for all Nigerians.”
