Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture, has advised the opposition parties to quit whining about the 2023 presidential election and accept loss in the election they so badly lost.


Both Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, according to Mohammed, lost the election owing to overconfidence and complacency.


"Mr President's analysis on the reasons for the opposition's loss in the 2023 elections was incontrovertible," the Minister said in a statement issued in Abuja on Sunday by his Special Assistant (Media), Segun Adeyemi.

"President Buhari deserves nothing but accolades for delivering undoubtedly the best election in Nigeria’s history, adding that the tempestuous but predictable reaction to the President’s comments by the opposition has shown them for what they are: shameless sore losers.

"President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his billing by delivering a free, fair and credible election, and his legacy is assured. The President would rather lose his state and many of his party’s strongholds than tamper with the fidelity of the election, and that is why he provided a level playing field for all parties," Mohammed said.

"Going by the results, none of the opposition parties met any of the conditions stipulated for winning the presidential election. They didn’t even come close, in spite of their pre-election grandstanding," he added.

"They (opposition) keep leaning on some international observers to justify their fraudulent claim that the election was rigged.

"They conveniently forgot what Ambassador Johnnie Carson, the revered US diplomat who co-led the National Democratic Institute and International Republican Institute International Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said that the APC candidate undoubtedly won the polls.

"They also forgot that the African Union Election Observation Mission to Nigeria said the atmosphere was generally calm and peaceful in 95% of the polling units visited," he said, adding that it is on the strength of these reports that many nations, including the US and the UK, wasted no time in congratulating the victorious APC presidential candidate."

Mohammed slammed the opposition on the issue of IReV portal, he said, "The opposition’s insinuation that the failure to immediately upload the result of the presidential election onto IReV affected the credibility of the election is a fraud. It is an act of blackmail and deceit by desperate individuals.

"The opposition Labour Party, in particular, will go down in the history books as the first-ever distant third-place finisher in a presidential election anywhere to have bold-facedly claimed victory," he added.