•Says Obi, Atiku’s victory claims capable of creating chaos

•Asks INEC to speak up on attempts to hack its server

By Olayinka Ajayi

FORMER governor of Ogun State, Chief Olusegun Osoba, has urged supporters of presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar and his Labour Party, LP, counterpart, Mr. Peter Obi, not to allow their grievances over the presidential election to snowball into a tribal and religious crisis.

Chief Osoba, who was fielding questions on TVC’s Journalist Hang-out, prayed that Nigeria would never experience the Rwandan situation.

Insisting that the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections were the best in the history of balloting in Nigeria, Osoba said Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC, deserved his victory and would do well as president.

While noting that non-transmission of the results realtime on the portal of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, was not enough to cancel the election, he urged the commission to defend itself on several attempts to hack its portal.

Asked the kind of president he foresaw Tinubu would be, the APC chieftain said: “He has the capacity to create stability and unity. He will be a team-playing president. For example, in the oil sector, I expect him to block all the leakages. One thing I know is that he is a very courageous character. He is a very hardworking person.

“I was involved with the late MKO Abiola saga, I pray we shall never have a Rwanda situation in Nigeria.

“I must say with all sense of responsibility, this has been the most peaceful election that we have ever had and again, this is one election where the turnout was very large. Although they keep comparing to other elections, in the case of this election, the voting process was sanitised. As far as I am concerned, this election is the most peaceful and reasonably transparent.

“Because the BVAS did not load on time should not be the reason why anybody need to query the result because the result had been counted, collated at the polling units, ward level and signed, collated at local government level and signed, and then to the House of Rep centres and Senatorial centres, then at the state level, the presidential election resulted was collated there and signed. About six levels have been found to be collated. I can assure you that at the time compared to what is on the server, it would tally with time and date.

“I have been involved with elections since 1959, Asiwaju’s spread is the best I have ever seen. He is a candidate that defies all odds. In the Middle-Belt, where we had religious issues, he won Benue, made his mark in Plateau, won Kogi, won Kwara, and won Niger State. In the Caliphate, Atiku won by about 3000 margin to Asiwaju’s votes. Atiku won in Osun, it beats my imagination that Atiku could win in Osun. So is Atiku saying that he also rigged in Osun?

“Look at Obi’s performance: In Nasarawa, Obi won, in Lagos, he won, in Delta, he won. So as far as I am concerned, this election has shown that it is a prime mandate and secondly, Southern and Northern Nigeria showed unity. Take Asiwaju for instance; a man who can win 25 per cent in 29 out of 36 states, in other words, a man who scored 80 per cent and you are saying he manipulated the examination, I still can’t get it.”

Asked the factors that determine the action, he said: “there are so many factors; in the first place, you can criticise INEC till eternity, the introduction of BVAS sanitised the process. It reduced rigging heavily. So when you look at the whole thing you will realise that the factors that influenced the elections were many.

“I praise the Nigerian youths and I am appealing to elder statesmen to find the need for reconciliation and resolution. The Christian communities are complaining about the Muslim-Muslim ticket, what are the things that you want? The youths should be able to say the election is over. These are the things that we want.”

Asked about the claim of Obi and Atiku that they won the election, Osoba said: “It is an attempt to draw us back and create chaos within the system because they all have the results signed by their agents all over the country and they know what happened. To now claim they won the election is a disappointment to me. I assure you that Nigerians are wiser now. Nobody will be instigated or provoked into turning the nation on fire.”

On INEC’s non-uploading of result

On why INEC didn’t upload the result, Osoba said: “The youths have the right to question INEC’s inability to upload the result instantly as promised from the polling units. But as an investigative journalist, I made my investigation and I gathered that there were so many attempts to jam INEC portal and server and that would have created chaos for INEC. 

”It is unfortunate that INEC has not handled their public relations well. They should have told the world that they deliberately shutdown their portal to protect their information from being hacked. 

”Ask the banks in Nigeria how much they are losing to mobile bank hackers. I will urge everybody to wait but if Obi and Atiku are complaining about rigging, they should give specific information.”