Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has described the statement by the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, that he won the 25 February presidential election as misleading, noting that the claim of the rigging of the poll was false.

Spokesperson of the PCC, Festus Keyamo, in a statement on Thursday, said the claim by Obi is an attempt to delegitimise the mandate given to the president-elect, Bola Tinubu.

Obi had during a press conference on Thursday claimed that he won the presidential election and would be challenging the outcome of the election in court.

Independent National Electoral Commission had on Wednesday declared Tinubu winner of Saturday’s election having polled the simple majority of total votes cast and a quarter of votes cast in two-thirds of states.

Tinubu won the poll with 8,794,726 votes while Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) came second with 6,984,520 and Obi third with 6,101,533 votes.

The two main opposition parties have rejected the outcome, alleging rigging and non-compliance with extant laws.

“Obi knows he could not have won having played the most divisive religious politics in our history and the pattern of the votes clearly shows that; Obi knows he could not have won having broken out as a fragment of the main opposition, the PDP and all he could hope for was to harvest a portion of the votes of PDP in a section of the country and the results do NOT tell a lie; Obi knows he could not have won, when he presented himself as a tribal candidate and was only campaigning in settlements of his tribesmen in other States, outside the Southeast instead of appealing to all and sundry,” Keyamo said.

PT