The PDP and LP made their positions known at a Tuesday press conference attended by their vice-presidential candidates, Ifeanyi Okowa and Datti Baba-Ahmed respectively.
Nigeria’s president-elect, Bola Tinubu, says the All Progressives Congress could not have done better in the 2023 general elections.
According to him, those who lost to him should move on as democrats.
The former Lagos governor finished with 8,794,726, nearly two million more votes than his fiercest challengers, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who polled 6,984,520 and Labour Party (LP)’s Peter Obi, who got 6,101,533.
The total number of votes cast was 24,965,218, out of which 939,278 were rejected votes.
However, PDP and LP had called for the cancellation of the presidential election over allegations that INEC, did not comply with the law in the collation and announcement of results.
The PDP and LP made their positions known at a Tuesday press conference attended by their vice-presidential candidates, Ifeanyi Okowa and Datti Baba-Ahmed respectively.
“The election was a sham, and never free and fair,” said Okowa of the PDP, a position corroborated by the LP’s vice-presidential candidate.
Their main grouse is that INEC failed to upload the results of elections in the over 170,000 polling units onto a central server (IReV) as required by law. That step should have been done before the collation and announcement of results, they said.
Speaking during a visit to President Muhammadu Buhari in Daura, Katsina, on Wednesday, Tinubu said the ruling APC was very lucky there was ‘no problem’ during the poll.
He added that as a loyal party man, they came to present their certificates of return to the president as the party leader and to commend him for his efforts to support democracy in Africa.
The president-elect said, “This is the largest democracy in Africa. We could not have done any better. We are lucky, there is no accident, and no matter how provocative a defeat is, we have to tolerate it if we are democrats. We have a nation to build.”