Tunji Wusu –
Akin Osuntokun, director general of the Labour Party Presidential Campaign Council, has demanded that Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, national chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, be fired immediately and prosecuted for his involvement in the 2023 presidential elections.
Additionally, Osuntokun urged that a forensic financial inquiry be carried out into all of the commission’s pre-election, during-election, and post-election expenditures and donations.
At a Thursday international press conference conducted at the party’s campaign headquarters in Abuja, the campaign director made the demand.
“We emphatically demand Prof. Mahmud Yakubu’s immediate resignation from his position and prosecution, as well as the launch of a forensic financial probe into how donors’ money and budgeted disbursements were used by INEC.
“This is in addition to the N300 billion appropriated from the national purse as well as other funds and materials received from International donor Agencies,” the speaker stated.
Only five months have passed since the panel declared Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, the victor of the poll on February 25.
Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, who received 6,984,520 and 6,101,533 votes respectively, were defeated by Tinubu, who received 8,794,726 votes.
However, Atiku and Obi disagreed with the findings, each asserting during separate press conferences that there was significant violence and rigging during the election.
In order to seek justice, both candidates went to the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.
Osuntokun responded to the court case by telling journalists on Thursday that all of the PDP and LP’s evidence supported their earlier suspicions that the election had been tainted by anomalies.
Festus Okoye, National Commissioner of INEC and Chairman of the Information and Voter Education Committee, along with other top administrative and field staff, were called for to face punishment for their alleged complicity, but he also issued a warning against further intimidating the European Union and other election observers over their reports on the election.
The spokesperson for the APC administration and other uninformed individuals’ negative and cynical comments on the EU Report and other Election Observers’ reports, which are completely at odds with the mood of the country at this time, as well as their selective celebration of the 2019 Election reports from these same Observer groups, are strongly condemned by the Labour Party and the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Organization.
“Now that the final Observer Group reports have been released, it only makes sense that the International Community take swift and appropriate punitive action against Prof. Mahmud Yakubu, Barrister Festus Okoye, and other top INEC officials who were directly involved in the savagery of these elections.
“We urge those who sent hired ‘protesters’ to the EU offices in response to their election report to stop wasting public money because the goal of intimidation is baseless and has failed from the start – because the irregularities in the election were so glaringly obvious, with bitter personal and reported experiences, by the vast majority of Nigerians.
“We would like to draw Nigerians’ attention to the fact that the EU Observer group report is consistent with reports from other international and domestic observers who were duly accredited by INEC, as well as consistent with the general public’s opinion and the experiences of most Nigerians who took part in or watched the general elections in 2023.
“At this point, there is no doubt that Nigerians and the international community expect the judiciary to critically examine the evidence, the law, and the processes of these flawed elections, in order to arrive at a legally correct, and overwhelmingly acknowledgeable verdict,” the statement reads.
