Following the outcome of the February 25 presidential election, Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has been in the eye of the storm lately. ADEBAYO FOLORUNSHO-FRANCIS takes a cursory look at the drama which reached a climax recently with audio recording, which the presidential candidate has described as fake

Like or hate him, the Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has changed the narration of the just concluded election with the flurry of votes and results he amassed in different categories of the polls.

To its credit, the Labour Party today has seven senators-elect and 34 House of Representatives-elect waiting to be inaugurated. It is no secret that the majority of these lawmakers rode on Obi’s back to win their respective seats.

Despite having no structure and losing the presidential election in what political pundits described as a controversial manner, Obi’s victory, especially in Lagos, was an earthquake many did not see coming.

His message of transparency and accountability resonated well with the youth population of the Millennial and Gen-Z under the umbrella of the Obidient Movement.

Aside from decimating the stronghold of the Peoples Democratic Party in the South-East and South through his fairy-tale run in the poll, his ‘happy-ending’ ambition was however cut short by the deluge of results from the North-West and North-East, which proved to be his Achilles heel.

The standard bearer of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who was declared as the eventual winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission, polled 8,794,726 votes to defeat the PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar and Obi who garnered 6,984,520 and 6,101,533 votes at the poll respectively.

But Atiku and Obi rejected the results announced by INEC, with each claiming at separate press conferences that the election was fraught with violence and massive rigging.

A teary Obi, who felt INEC didn’t do justice to the results by failing to show the results in real-time, announced on a number of political programmes that he would reclaim his ‘stolen’ mandate by going to the court as being directed.

A first-timer viewer, who was just seeing some of the television interviews he had, can see through his pain, anguish and agony even as he struggled to address certain allegations about running a political campaign that was thriving in religiosity and ethnicity.

His Vice Presidential Candidate, Datti Baba-Ahmed, also came under fire last month when he was featured on Channels Television’s ‘Politics Today’ and made some comments considered incendiary.

The North-West politician had warned the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) not to hand over to the president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, on May 29, otherwise it would signal the ‘end of democracy.’

A furious Baba-Ahmed also stated that the INEC certificate of return issued to the president-elect by INEC was a ‘dud cheque’ that remains null and void.

According to him, the call for the cancellation of the poll was necessitated by the fact that Tinubu failed to amass 25 per cent of votes in the Federal Capital Territory, which was one of the prerequisites needed before a winner of the presidential election can be declared.