A faction of the Labour Party led by Lamidi Apapa has accepted the tribunal’s verdict on the 2023 presidential election.
The tribunal had dismissed a petition by Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the Labour Party, against President Bola Tinubu’s victory at the 2023 polls saying it lacked merit.
While Obi’s faction had rejected the verdict, Apapa’s group says Obi was only on a wild goose chase.
The lengthy statement by its spokesperson, Abayomi Arabambi, reads:
“It is a shame that the legal team of Mr Peter Obi failed to advice him properly before going to the tribunal.
“Peter Obi has just gone on a wild goose chase. Imagine the candidate that failed to fund the party in order to engage the number of required polling agents, also the filing of the witnesses outside the stipulated time has shown that the legal team is a failure.
“Some of us have been saying that Peter Obi decided to go to the tribunal to justify all the money he collected during the campaign, all that money was corruptly syphoned.
“Its unfortunate that Obi failed to convince the Tribunal those polling units where he was rigged out.
“Thus, our previous position has now been confirmed that Peter Obi was just all out to defraud our party of donations made towards 2023 general election which was in a scary sum of $15million and N12 billion that Peter Obi deliberate used for cure Abure poverty lineage and help other Julius Abure IPOB irresponsible ethnic irredeemable irredentist supporters in order to have a life line
“Our party is also in tandem with the tribunal that the claim by the Labour Party concerning the blurred 18,088 results sheets is totally unfounded as the party ought to have agents at every polling unit who will have a copy of the result sheet, but here Peter Obi fraudulently converted all monies due to our agents across the country and they all refuse to represent the party at all pooling units
“On Peter Obi request that 25% FCT vote is a requirement before a president can be declared, we noted that this is a shame on the part of Peter Obi legal teams to be told in clear terms that Abuja is equal to every other states in Nigeria since according to the Tribunal, residents of Abuja don’t have special privileges, every Nigerian is equal.
“Finally, in the hall of fame of absurdities, the prayers presented at the tribunal by Peter Obi and the restrained former National Chairman, Julius Abure should be framed for entertainment of future students of Law
“How does anyone claim to have won an election based solely on pejoratives, assumption, vague rhetorics and zero evidence pointing to such being the case, but on the expectation that the actual winner would be disqualified and by some stroke of black magic, the candidate in the 3rd place will suddenly be declared winner, without any proof of having scored the majority vote is absolute rascality on display by Peter Obi and Julius Abure.
“As a law abiding party, we accept the verdict, and we are going back to the drawing board to know where we have gone wrong.”
