Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has
asked the PDP and its presidential candidate in the last elections to
apologize to Nigerians for willfully distracting the Buhari
Administration with a frivolous election petition, instead of
appealing the ruling of Wednesday’s Presidential Election Petition
Tribunal.
In a statement issued in St Petersburg, Russian Federation, on Thursday, the Minister said while the PDP and
its candidate reserve the right to pursue their petition to the
highest level, they will be better served by dropping their toga of
desperation and realizing that there is a limit to tomfoolery.
”Nigerians are tired of this orchestrated distraction, and will
rather wish that the opposition, having lost at the polls and in
court, will now join hands with the government to move Nigeria to the
next level.
”This is more so that the judgement validating the re-election of
President Muhammadu Buhari was unanimous that the petition lacked
merit, that the petitioners failed to prove any of the grounds upon
which their case was anchored and that President Buhari is eminently
qualified to contest the poll,” he said.
Mohammed said instead of casting aspersion on the judiciary
with their poorly-framed reaction to the ruling of the Tribunal, the
PDP and its candidate should be thanking their stars that they are not
being prosecuted for coming to court with a fraudulently-obtained
evidence.
”It is intriguing that a party that trumpets the rule of law at every
turn will present, in open court, evidence it claimed to have obtained
by hacking into a supposed INEC server. Don’t they realize this is a
criminal act for which they are liable? Instead of threatening to head
to the Supreme Court, driven more by ego than commonsense, they
should be sorry for allowing desperation to overwhelm their sense of
reasoning. Enough is enough,” he said.
The Minister commended the Tribunal for not only doing justice to the
case but for explaining, in painstaking details that
lasted hours, how it arrived at its judgement.
”We also thank Nigerians, who voted massively to re-elect President
Buhari, for their continued support,” he said
