Aidoghie Paulinus, Abuja
The Federal government, has said that instead of appealing the Wednesday Presidential Election Tribunal judgement, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and its candidate in the election, Atiku Abubakar, should apologise to Nigerians.
Recall that the Presidential Election Tribunal ruled in favour of President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the 2019 presidential election, with the opposition PDP saying it will appeal the judgement.
But the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in a statement by his Special Assistant, Segun Adeyemi, asked the PDP and Atiku to apologise to Nigerians for willfully distracting the Buhari administration with a frivolous election petition.
In the statement issued in St Petersburg, Russian Federation, Mohammed said while the PDP and
its candidate reserved the right to pursue their petition to the highest level, they will be better served by dropping their toga of desperation and realising 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,” Mohammed said.
Mohammed also asked the PDP and Abubakar not to cast aspersion on the judiciary going by their poorly-framed reaction to the ruling of the tribunal.
He added that the PDP and Abubakar should be thanking their stars that they were  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 realise 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,” Mohammed added.
Mohammed, however, appreciated 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,” Mohammed also said.