By Shola Abayomi.
President Muhammadu Buhari has lauded the endorsement of the 2019 presidential election by 60 presidential candidates under the aegis of Joint Forum of Presidential candidates, who described the election as free, fair and credible.
Sequel to that, he urged other opposition parties to tow the same path in accepting their loss with grace and maturity.
The president, through a statement by the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said, ”We are encouraged by the patriotism of the Presidential Candidates expressed in clear and matured language.
”We are convinced that, regardless of our different political persuasions we can work together to improve electoral integrity in Nigeria.
”Democracy is founded on the will of the people and INEC did well to ensure this outcome was achieved in the 2019 elections.
“The success of democracy does not only depend on electoral laws, but also on behaviour, character and attitude of politicians.
“Do-or-die politics is a threat to the success of electoral laws and democracy. And you don’t need to kill in order to serve the people.’’
The Joint Forum of Presidential candidates, while commending the outcome of the presidential elections, yesterday, accused the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, of unnecessarily heating up the polity by claiming an electronic server was used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) during the 2019 presidential election, when the commission had earlier informed political parties involved in the 2019 elections that it will not transmit results electronically because there was no legal instrument backing it.
The chairman of the forum, Shittu Muhammed, in a chat with newsmen in Abuja, yesterday, said, “The needless controversy over the INEC Server would have been lawful as it would have been mandatory for the Commission to deploy the server. We are aware that INEC had run pilots on electronic transmission of results. It had informed us that these pilots were deployed in Anambra, Ondo, Ekiti and Osun Governorship elections.
“However, INEC informed all political parties in the election following the withholding of assent by the President that it would not deploy the electronic transmission of results since it would not be lawful to do so.”