ALHAJI Atiku Abubakar on Wednesday vowed to challenge in court the outcome of the last Saturday’s presidential election he contested on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
In a statement he personally signed and released to journalists, Atiku said: “I hereby reject the result of the February 23, 2019 sham election and will be challenging it in court.
“I want to assure my supporters and the entire Nigerian people that together, we will not allow democracy to be emasculated.”
The former vice president also declared that he wouldn’t have hesitated to congratulate President Muhammadu Buhari who was declared winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) if the election had not been characterised by outright fraud.
“If I had lost in a free and fair election, I would have called the victor within seconds of my being aware of his victory to offer not just my congratulations, but my services to help unite Nigeria by being a bridge between the North and the South.
“However, in my democratic struggles for the past three decades, I have never seen our democracy so debased as it was on Saturday, February 23, 2019. The 2007 was a challenge, but the then President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was remorseful. In 2019, it is sad to see those who trampled on democracy thumping their noses down on the Nigerian people,” he noted.
Atiku highlighted some of the shortcomings of the elections, which, according to him, include “manifest and premeditated malpractices in many states.”
The statement which was entitled “Democracy Will Not Be Emasculated in Nigeria” reads in part: “One obvious red flag is the statistical impossibility of states ravaged by the war on terror generating much higher voter turnouts than peaceful states. The suppressed votes in my strongholds are so apparent and amateurish, that I am ashamed as a Nigerian that such could be allowed to happen. How can total votes in Akwa Ibom, for instance, be 50 per cent less than what they were in 2015?”
According to him, “Another glaring anomaly is the disruption of voting in strongholds of the PDP in Lagos, Akwa Ibom, Rivers and diverse other states, with the authorities doing little or nothing and in some cases facilitating these unfortunate situations.
