The Presidential Campaign Council of the ruling All Progressives Congress (PCC APC) has said the complaint by the candidates of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar and Labour Party (LP) Peter Obi, over the electronic transmission of the result is not supported by law.
The ruling party, however, asked both Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi to pursue their grievances in court with decorum.
Both the candidates of PDP and LP had on Thursday rejected the outcome of the Presidential election and vowed to challenge Tinubu’s victory in Court.
Addressing a press conference Friday at the campaign headquarters of APC, Special Adviser on Media and Communication, Dele Alake, flanked with other media directors, said the claim that INEC did not use the BVAS is false, adding that those who voted across Nigeria, including Atiku and Obi, were accredited by BVAS.
Alake said: “We must say, however, that listening to both Atiku and Obi yesterday left us in the APC family confounded. We understand that there has been an orchestrated campaign by the acolytes of PDP and LP in the media to discredit the Presidential election. What we did not expect is that the two presidential candidates and, indeed, their political parties, would shamefully re-echo the puerile and unimaginative arguments that are being canvassed by political illiterates and mischief-makers who are crying wolf on the social media.
“As we all can see, these two otherwise experienced politicians are pinpointing lack of adherence to the guidelines as basis for discrediting the votes lawfully cast by Nigerians. We shall examine the so-called process that was purportedly breached by the electoral body and how it, in their wild imagination, undermined the credibility of the election.
“Save for bad losers that these two people have proven to be, we should rather be celebrating the tremendous improvement the use of BVAS has brought to our electoral process.
“The complaint over the electronic transmission of the result is not supported by law.
“Section 38 of the Electoral Acct 2022 referred to by the PDP and LP has nothing to do with transmission of election results. Section 60, subsection 2 of the Act deals with transmission of results and it is at the discretion of INEC. The Act does not contain any mandatory provision regarding the transmission of results.
“In any case, the process of transmitting results from polling units, whether real-time, two days later or at any time, cannot in anyway change the results that have been announced right after the counting in the presence of the parties’ agents and to the hearing of the voters. It is, therefore, nonsensical to insinuate that time variation in uploading results would cause a change in the figures.”
According to APC, the 2023 Presidential election is a watershed as it produced unprecedented outcomes and defied conventions. The deployment and use of BVAS is the only reason the elections produced these strange outcomes and upsets in many cases.
“The loss of Katsina and Lagos to PDP and LP respectively were contrary to expectations. BVAS brought the intended credibility to voters’ accreditation such that many governors and well-established politicians lost elections in what should be safe bet areas.
“The era of ghost-voting and stuffing of ballot boxes is gone. As the experience in the last governorship election in Osun State has shown, over-voting would automatically lead to outright cancellation of the results of the polling units based on the provision of the new Electoral Act.
“The same PDP that is trying to pull the wool across the face of Nigerians was the culprit in the Osun State governorship election. Did they try to do it this time and it failed? Or did they do it in the areas they unexpectedly won? Did they have a grand plan to hack the INEC server if results were uploaded in real time? Nigerians will soon find out.”
While declaring its readiness to meet both Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar in court, the APC: “We want to enjoin the two of them to pursue their grievances with decorum. They should encourage their members, supporters, and ethnic and religious consultants to follow the path of the rule of law.
“We note that both Atiku and Obi are claiming victory, wouldn’t it make sense for them to agree who the actual winner is before challenging APC in court?
Meanwhile, the APC train has left the station as we continue our effort to make Nigeria better for all Nigerians.”
