The Federal Government says President Muhammadu Buhari has delivered on his promise to leave behind a legacy of free, fair and credible elections in the conduct of 2023 elections.
Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture, stated this in Washington DC during his official engagements with some international media organisations according to News Agency of Nigeria.
The minister who is in Washington to engage with international media organisations and Think Tanks on the just-concluded 2023 poll, has so far engaged respectively with the Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press and Foreign Policy Magazine.
Mohammed said in fulfilment of the President’s pledge to restore sanity into the electoral process, he resolved that he would not confer special advantage on any political party, including the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), during the election.
According to him, during the past elections, Buhari ensured that nobody used the security agencies to rig the election in his favour but created a level-playing ground for the elections to take place.
“A proof of this resolution is that the President’s party lost the presidential election in Katsina, his home state.
“Equally, the president-elect, Bola Tinubu, lost in his state, Lagos, while the Chairman of the Party, Abdulahi Adamu, lost in Nasarawa state to the Labour Party.
“The Director-General of the Campaign Organisation of our Party also lost to PDP in Plateau state.
“Nothing gives this elections more credence than those facts because there was no rigging in states where our big wigs come from,” Mohammed said.
He added that APC lost in the four states with the highest number of votes in the elections – Katsina, Kano, Kaduna and Lagos even when they were the ruling Party’s controlled states.
READ ALSO: Why My Son, Falz Always Embarrasses Government – Femi Falana
The Information minister said the allegations of fraud been bandied by the opposition and naysayers did not add up, adding that controversy was generated because of the inability of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to upload the results of the presidential election real time.
Information Nigeria had reported that the electoral body had come under fire over its inability to upload results immediately on the INEC Result Viewing (IReV)portal during the presidential and National Assembly elections.
But Mohammed maintained that the conclusion by the opposition and naysayers was based on ignorance of the role and functions of IReV.
He noted that the portal is a platform where election results at the polling level are uploaded, and not a tool for collation of election or to transmit results electronically.
“Under our laws today, management of election results is manual and the court has ruled that INEC has the exclusive right to determine the mode of election, its collation and transmission.
“What happened on the 25th of February was that INEC observed that the results of the Presidential elections were not being viewed.
“INEC, suspecting cyber attack, withheld the uploading of the results in order to preserve the integrity of the data.
“It immediately proceeded to float an alternative platform while asking its technicians to investigate what happened to its original portal.”
“It is unfortunate that this is what the opposition are relying on to say the elections were rigged.
“So far, none of the political parties has come out to say that what is on Form EC8A is different from what was uploaded on IReV,” he said.
