The Arewa Youth Consultative Forum (AYCF) has opposed calls by the Labour Party for sack of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman Mahmood Yakubu, saying they are bad losers and intolerant players.
The AYCF noted that from the outset of the presidential election the candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi and his supporters never accepted the fundamental truth that losing is always possible.
“ If Peter Obi and his Labour Party are not willing to accept the possibility that they might be defeated, then they should not be running for office in the first place,” the AYCF said in a statement by its president, Yarima Shettima.
AYCF said LP and Obi are not happy that the INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, has lived up to his commitment to a credible and verifiable election process supported by technology, which guaranteed transparent accreditation and upload of polling unit results for citizens to view in real-time on election day.
“The fact that LP and their supporters had given themselves the false hope that tried to guarantee victory for Obi long before the election explains why they are still unhappy that the deployment of a Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) were made sacrosanct by the INEC chairman.
“Many stakeholders, except of course, Obi and LP, considered it a game changer in Nigeria’s electoral process for Yakubu to have gone to such great lengths to deploy technology for the purpose of restoring integrity to the ballot box in Nigeria.
“It is not surprising that no matter how credible the 2023 February elections turned out to be, bad losers like Obi would opt to discredit the outcome and imperil democracy,” Shettima said.
He said it is essential that candidates and their parties – as well as all their supporters seeking to help them win election – refrain from brash assertions of victory that suggest defeat is only possible if there is fraud.
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