The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said that President Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) has fulfilled his pledge to leave a legacy of free, fair and credible elections with the conduct of the 2023 polls. Speaking in Washington DC during official engagements with international media, Mohammed noted that Buhari lost his home state of Katsina to the Peoples Democratic Party and President‑elect Bola Tinubu lost Lagos to the Labour Party, evidence he described as proof of the elections’ credibility.
Mohammed is in Washington to meet with international media organisations and think tanks about the recently concluded polls. He has already spoken with the Washington Post, Voice of America, Associated Press and Foreign Policy Magazine. Emphasising the President’s commitment to restoring sanity to the electoral process, the minister said Buhari resolved not to give any political party—including the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC)—a special advantage. According to Mohammed, the President ensured that security agencies were not used to rig the election, creating a level playing field. “Proof of this resolution is that the President’s party lost the presidential election in Katsina, his home state,” he said, adding that President‑elect Tinubu also lost in Lagos, APC Chairman Abdullahi Adamu lost in Nasarawa, and the party’s campaign director‑general was defeated by the PDP in Plateau. “Nothing gives this election more credence than those facts because there was no rigging in states where our bigwigs come from,” he asserted.
The minister highlighted that the APC lost in the four states with the highest vote totals—Katsina, Kano, Kaduna and Lagos—even though these were traditionally controlled by the ruling party. He dismissed allegations of fraud as unfounded, attributing the controversy to INEC’s inability to upload presidential results in real time. While INEC faced criticism for not immediately posting results on its Result Viewing portal during the February 25 elections, Mohammed argued that opponents misunderstood the role of IReV, a platform that uploads polling‑level results but does not collate or transmit them electronically. “Under our laws, the management of election results is manual, and the court has ruled that INEC has the exclusive right to determine the mode of election, its collation and transmission,” he explained.
Mohammed said that on February 25 INEC noticed the presidential results were not being viewed and, suspecting a cyber‑attack, temporarily withheld uploading to protect data integrity. An alternative platform was quickly deployed, and by about 9 p.m. both portals were operational. He noted that no political party has claimed a discrepancy between the Form EC8A and the IReV uploads, calling the opposition’s rigging accusations “unfortunate.”
Addressing delays in delivering election materials, the minister acknowledged the logistical challenges of a country as diverse as Nigeria, with 176,846 polling units spread across varied terrain. Some areas required donkeys, human porters or boats for access, and an unexpected cash crunch—exacerbated by the redesign of the naira—slowed movements because many transporters demanded cash payments that were unavailable.
Finally, Mohammed cited a police report that identified 489 cases of electoral infractions involving 781 offenders, a ratio of roughly one infraction per 300 polling units. He argued that this level of misconduct was insufficient to invalidate the elections. NAN.
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