APC sets up legal team to defend mandate

The Presidential Campaign Council of the All Progressives Congress on Friday said it had constituted a legal team to defend the mandate given to the party and the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, by Nigerians in the February 25 presidential election.

The campaign council stated this during a press conference in Abuja in response to the candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar, and the Labour Party, Peter Obi, following their separate press conferences held on Thursday, a report by ThisDay Live says.

The spokesperson for the APC PCC, Festus Keyamo, said he was part of the legal team constituted by the party.

Keyamo said, “As I am talking to you, we have constituted our legal team. We are going to court too. Let it not be that they are the only ones going to court. I am part of the legal team.”

Special Adviser on Media and Communication of the APC PCC, Dele Alake, thanking the PDP and the LP for “opting for the rule of law”, after “the initial belligerent posture as they continue their baseless journey of chasing after a mirage.”

Alake stated: “We must thank the two of them for finally opting for the rule of law as against the initial belligerent posture as they continue their baseless journey of chasing after a mirage.”

The campaign council said the APC welcomed the decision of both the PDP and LP and also the NNPP candidates to test their claims in the court as provided for by the constitution.

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 the PDP and the 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 social media.”

He noted that the claim that the Independent National Electoral Commission did not use the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System was false and an attempt to discredit the votes lawfully cast by Nigerians.

He stressed that voters across Nigeria, including Atiku and Obi, were accredited by the BVAS.

He stated that the complaint over the electronic transmission of results was not supported by law.

Alake said, “Section 38 of the Electoral Acct 2022 referred to by the PDP and the LP has nothing to do with transmission of election results. Section 60, Sub-section 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 any way 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.”

He noted that the presidential election produced unprecedented outcomes and defied conventions, adding that the deployment and use of BVAS was the only reason the elections produced these strange outcomes and upsets in many cases.

The campaign council noted, “The loss of Katsina and Lagos to the PDP and the 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.”