During his official engagements with some international media organizations in Washington DC, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, stated that President Buhari had kept his promise to conduct free, fair and credible elections during the 2023 polls.
The minister cited the loss of Buhari’s state, Katsina, and the President-elect Bola Tinubu’s state, Lagos, to the opposition parties as evidence that the elections were credible. Mohammed was in Washington to engage with international media organizations and think tanks about the recently concluded 2023 polls.
He said that Buhari had created a level playing field for all political parties, including the ruling All Progressives Congress, and had ensured that no one used the security agencies to rig the election. The minister also said that the allegations of fraud were baseless, and the controversy over the inability of INEC to upload results in real-time was unnecessary.
He explained that the management of election results is manual, and the role of IREV was to upload election results at the polling level, not to transmit results electronically.
He also said that it was challenging to deliver election materials simultaneously in a country as diverse as Nigeria, and there were pockets of violence scattered throughout the country but not enough to discredit the polls.
