Buhari should be blamed for the fiasco of the presidential polls, says Osuntokun

Akin Osuntokun, director-general of the Labour Party (LP) presidential campaign council, says President Muhammadu Buhari should be blamed for the “fiasco” of the presidential election.

Speaking on Wednesday in an interview on Channels Television, Osuntokun said Buhari was the one who promised to bequeath a free and fair election to Nigeria.

He argued that the promise by the president did not translate to the conduct of free and fair elections.

“The buck stops on his (Buhari) table and secondly it was not the Nigerian public who said they were going to use the conduct of this election as a yardstick to measure his performance,” Osuntokun said.

“He was the one who said so repeatedly. He said, ‘I want to be remembered as the person who conducted the best election’.

“So, how do you then reconcile this with what he said? How do you reconcile the fiasco that we have on the ground?

Asked if results were rigged in places where LP won, Osuntokun responded in affirmation, saying the party’s margins of victory were reduced.

“Yes, they were because we won with wider margins. The credible speculation about the result in Lagos is that LP had about 900,000 or one million votes and then we were given 582,000 to beat APC with 572,000.

“So because of that I should accept the deceit, I should accept that fraud because somebody has declared us winners.

“What about the areas where they have worked against your interest? Even in the areas where we were declared as victors, we were still cheated, especially Lagos.

“The margin with which we defeated the other political parties in Lagos was extremely beyond what the INEC wrote down.”

Prior to the presidential and national assembly elections, Buhari had, on numerous occasions, promised to bequeath a legacy of free and fair elections.