•Says president lacked sound pedigree to lead Nigeria
•Insists dictatorship creeping into nation, queries competence of appointees
•LP candidate’s defeat has done incalculable damage to your psyche, APC replies
Adedayo Akinwale and Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja
A former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) under the Muhammadu Buhari administration, Babachir Lawal, yesterday, insisted that the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr Peter Obi, won the February 25 presidential election in Nigeria.
The former federal government scribe, in a statement in Abuja, insisted that the officially declared winner, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), came a distant third behind Obi and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
But the APC has fired back, saying Obi’s defeat at the February 25 polls had done incalculable damage to Babachir’s psyche.
The former SGF stated that he came to the conclusion following bits and pieces of information from various sources of factual data he independently aggregated.
“I have resisted the temptation to engage in the contemporary political discourse since the May 2023 election faux pas. I did this for two reasons. The first being that as an active player in the drama, I needed time to analyse and digest the data that led to the outcome(s) so I could arrive at an informed decision.
“The second, being that the rainy season had just set in and it was necessary that I focused my attention on my farms, which are the mainstay of my livelihood.
“The current topical issues for political discourse and inquiry are whether or not Bola Tinubu won the presidential election and/or that he was apriori, qualified to participate in the election given his murky biodata as is now being publicly unveiled daily in an avalanche.
“My answer to the first inquiry is that regardless of whatever INEC or Appeal Court said or did, Bola did not win the election. Right from the start of the campaigns, Bola knew he was not going to win the election in a free and fair contest so he decided to go by all means.
“Available factual data as aggregated from several independent sources indicate that Obi got the majority votes while Atiku came second. Bola came a distant third in the number of votes scored,” he argued.
On Tinubu’s qualification for the election, Babachir stressed that given the now unfolding deluge of ‘uncomplimentary information’ about who or what Tinubu actually is, sound ethics and morality should have convinced him to voluntarily excuse himself from participation in the election.
Notwithstanding, Babachir said he believed that Tinubu still has the time and opportunity to save himself what he described as the ‘public humiliation and embarrassment to his person’, both locally and internationally by resigning to give more attention to his health.
“After all, no one knows about the truism of these severely embarrassing and humiliating exposures about his person than the man himself.
“Leadership is all about integrity; sound pedigree, trustworthiness and the ability to unite and instil hope and confidence in the people one seeks to lead. In these qualities, most Nigerians are in total agreement that Bola has them in very short supply indeed.
“But now, six months down the line, the chicken has come home to roost as Nigerians have come to the realisation that we have not got what we deserve politically,” he added.
Meanwhile, the National Publicity Secretary of the APC, Felix Morka, in a statement, said Lawal emerged from his hibernation slinging incoherent aspersions on the person of the President of Tinubu, and the exalted office he occupies.
“After a long hiatus licking his wounds from the monumental electoral loss of his candidate in the last presidential election, Mr. Lawal unabashedly is out again, peddling gibberish, rather than learn from his political misadventure with equanimity.
“Clearly, the defeat of his principal, Peter Obi, at the poll has done incalculable damage to Mr. Lawal’s psyche and his capacity for rational thought as evident in his analysis based entirely on the figment of his warped imagination rather than on hard facts and figures.
“A clear sign of his disconnect from reality was his reference to the election held in May 2023, rather than February,” he said.
The ruling party, therefore, challenged Lawal to give a detailed breakdown of his so-called “aggregated facts sourced from independent sources,” which he claimed proved that Obi won the election or forever keep mute.
Morka said he did not provide these facts to help Obi prove his case before the Presidential Elections Petitions Court was a massive disservice if not betrayal of his political principal.
The spokesperson stressed that Lawal ought to have known that running a jaundiced commentary on a matter before the Supreme Court was the height of irresponsibility, adding that, he was still nursing bitterness and vindictiveness over his failed dream of running on a joint ticket with Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
