By Precious Oham
The Federal Government has issued a stern warning to former President Olusegun Obasanjo, asking him not to truncate the 2023 general elections with his “inciting, self-serving and provocative” letter on the elections.
Obasanjo had on Monday worried over the conduct of the 2023 presidential election, accusing the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, of having failed the country.
The former President further alleged massive rigging of the election and wondered why the Electoral Act 2022 as amended was trampled upon.
But in a statement in Abuja on Tuesday, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said what the former President cunningly framed as an ‘appeal for caution and rectification’ is nothing but a calculated attempt to undermine the electoral process and a willful incitement to violence.
The Minister expressed shock and disbelief that a former President could throw around unverified claims and amplify wild allegations picked up from the street against the electoral process.
According to him, “Though masquerading as an unbiased and concerned elder statesman, former President Obasanjo is in reality a known partisan who is bent on thwarting, by subterfuge, the choice of millions of Nigerian voters,” he said.
Alhaji Mohammed recalled that the former President, in his time, organized perhaps the worst election since Nigeria’s return to democratic rule in 1999, hence he is the least qualified to advise a President whose determined effort to leave a legacy of free, fair, credible and transparent election is well acknowledged within and outside Nigeria.
”As the whole nation waits with bated breath for the result of last Saturday’s national elections, amid unnecessary tension created by professional complainants and political jesters, what is expected from a self-respecting elder statesman are words and actions that douse tension and serve as a soothing balm.”
