Keyamo tackles Obi for ‘playing the victim’ in Nigeria’s election

The spokesman for the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign council, Festus Keyamo, on Thursday berated the Labour Party candidate, Peter Obi, for claiming that he won last Saturday’s presidential election in the country.

Obi had during a media briefing in Abuja claimed that he was robbed of his mandate by the APC, and had vowed to challenge the results of the election in court.

Keyamo, who reacted to the former Anambra State governor’s claim on his Twitter handle, accused him (Obi) of benefiting from election irregularities in his stronghold but failed to mention that at the media briefing.

He wrote: “He pretends to play the victim, whereas he is the greatest culprit in this game of brickbats. Mr. Peter Obi is always quick to cite some isolated incidents of irregularities outside his strongholds that could not have substantially affected the outcome of the results in those areas, whereas he deliberately fails to comment on tons and tons of evidence circulating everywhere wherein his supporters in his strongholds engaged in thuggery, hooliganism, violence and outright falsification of figures against our party and our supporters.”

The minister of state for labour and employment stressed that Obi could not have won the election even though he ran a divisive campaign.

He noted that the LP candidate did not get the required spread across 2/3 in the election.

READ ALSO: Obi’s running mate, Baba-Ahmed, claims Labour Party won Nigeria’s presidential election

Keyamo added: “Obi knows he could not have won having played the most divisive religious politics in our history and the pattern of the votes clearly shows that; Obi knows he could not have won having broken out as a fragment of the main opposition, the PDP and all he could hope for was to harvest a portion of the votes of PDP in a section of the country and the results do not tell a lie.

“Mr. Obi knows he could not have won when he presented himself as a tribal candidate and was only campaigning in settlements of his tribesmen in other states outside the South-East instead of appealing to all and sundry.

“Mr. Obi knows he could not have won having joined the Labour Party a few months ago and bought the ticket of the party without valid primaries and thereby polarised his party; Mr. Peter Obi knows he did not win because he did not even fulfill the minimum requirement of our constitution which requires a spread of 25 percent in two-thirds of the states of the Federation. He did not come even close. With his divisive rhetoric, he could not have come close.

“It is also ludicrous that Mr. Peter Obi is laying claim to victory along with his new-found partner, the PDP that is also laying claim to victory. I tweeted this morning, thus: ‘This is the first time in my entire life that I am seeing people who came 2nd and 3rd in an exam both claiming they took first and then agreeing to protest together to the examiner to record that both of them took first, yet they are not seeing the contradiction in their actions. We stand by that comment.”

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Wednesday declared Tinubu as the winner of the election after polling 8,794,726 votes to defeat the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, Obi, and 15 other candidates in the election.

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