Election petition: APC already planning for re-run, says LP

The National Chairman of the Labour Party, Mr Julius Abure on Monday said he got information that the All Progressives Congress was already preparing for a possible re-run of the 2023 presidential election urging members of the party to be alert.

Abure said this during an online meeting held with Nigerian-American Coalition for Justice and Democracy, led by Professor Eddie Oparaoji, the Labour Party Diaspora Chairman in the United States, in Abuja reports The PUNCH.

He explained the ruling party was aware the tide was heavily tilted against it in the ongoing legal challenge to the presidential election results as declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission.

Acting National Publicity Secretary of the party, Obiora Ifoh, in a statement quoted Abure as calling on the over 10 million members of the party to be “on the alert and get ready to further humiliate APC and its government in the polls if their sinister plot fails to materialize.”

He said: “Rumours have it that those in government are already planning for rerun and this is one of the support we will be canvasing from you.

“We should also be getting prepared because since all those in government are already preparing for rerun, we should not be taken unawares.

“So, we will be needing your engagement and support on this aspect if par adventure it happens today, that the election is nullified which is not what we are asking for because we are asking for an outright declaration of Peter Obi as the President of Nigeria.

“We believe strongly that we won that election given the statistics we have, given the result we have, we are not expecting anything less than the declaration of Peter Obi as the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. But supposing that didn’t happen as the government is believed to be planning for a rerun it will not also be out of place for us to be preparing for a rerun election.

“Having said this by the side, I must say clearly that we have put all our evidence before the court we are very hopeful that the tribunal will act in our favour.

“We are very hopeful that supposing the matter gets to the higher court, the Supreme Court, in this case, it will also act in our favour. We are keeping our hope and confidence alive.

“In nine months we are able to change the political narratives of this country and we must build on that successes so that we can have a more formidable party that we can strategically position for the downtrodden people of Nigeria.”

In his contribution to the discussion, the Director of the ObiDatti Presidential Campaign, Ambassador Oseloka Obaze, urged Obi-Datti members in the diaspora to see the struggle for recovering the party’s mandate as a collective responsibility.