Following the rejection, on Wednesday, of the petition filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the Presidential Elections Petition Tribunal, the opposition party has rejected the verdict of the appellate court.
The PDP also said it would challenge the ruling at the Supreme Court.
The PETP had ruled that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, actually lost the election to incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari during the February 23, 2019, general elections.
But reacting to the PDP’s rejection of the election tribunal, Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, has
asked the PDP and its presidential candidate in the last elections to
apologise to Nigerians for “willfully distracting” the Buhari Administration with an election petition.
READ ALSO: Police arrest Abuja-Kaduna road kidnap kingpin
Mohammed said instead of appealing the ruling of Wednesday’s Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, the opposition party should be apologizing to Nigerians for trying to distract the present government.
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.
Alhaji 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