President Bola Tinubu, says the yardstick and assessment of the European Union Observers Mission cannot determine the credibility and transparency of the country’s elections.
TheHintsNews reports that last Tuesday, the EU mission presented its report on the general election in Abuja, where its Chief Observer, Barry Andrews, faulted the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the operational challenges and glitches experienced with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the result viewing portal, saying the discrepancies severely damaged public confidence in the electoral body.
However, the President through a statement by his Special Duties, Communications and Strategy, Dele Alake, said he was not unaware of the machinations of the European Union to sustain its, largely, unfounded bias and claims on the election outcomes.
He noted that he found it preposterous and unconscionable that in this day and age, any foreign organisation of whatever hue can continue to insist on its own yardstick and assessment as the only way to determine the credibility and transparency of our elections.
Tinubu stressed that there was no substantial evidence provided by the European Union or any foreign and local organisation that is viable enough to impeach the integrity of the 2023 election outcomes.
The President said: “Sometimes in May, we alerted the nation, through a press statement, to the plan by a continental multilateral institution to discredit the 2023 general election conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The main target was the presidential election, clearly and fairly won by the then candidate of All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu.
“While we did not mention the name of the organisation in the said statement, we made it abundantly clear to Nigerians how this foreign institution had been unrelenting in its assault on the credibility of the electoral process, the sovereignty of our country and on our ability as a people to organise ourselves.”
Tinubu reiterated that the 2023 general election, especially the presidential election, won by Tinubu was credible, peaceful, free, fair and the best organised general election in Nigeria since 1999.
The President wondered how the EU reached the conclusions in the submitted final report with the very limited coverage of the elections by their observers who, without doubt, relied more on rumours, hearsay, cocktails of prejudiced and uninformed social media commentaries and opposition talking heads.
Tinubu added: “We are convinced that what EU-EOM called final report on our recent elections is a product of a poorly done desk job that relied heavily on a few instances of skirmishes in less than 1000 polling units out of over 176,000 where Nigerians voted on election day.
“We have many reasons to believe the jaundiced report, based on the views of fewer than 50 observers, was to merely sustain the same premature denunciatory stance contained in EU’s preliminary report released in March.
“We strongly reject, in its entirety, any notion and idea from any organisation, group and individual remotely suggesting that the 2023 election was fraudulent.”