PEPT: Stop wasting your time in court – PDP chieftain tells Atiku

PDP chairman in Ekiti State, Lere Olayinka, has asked for Atiku Abubakar to withdraw as the party’s presidential candidate.

He called for the outgoing vice president to resign so that new, younger leaders within the PDP may be appointed.

During the last Congressional election, Olayinka led the opposition party’s ticket in Ekiti Central Federal Constituency 2, where he ran as a Democrat.

He said that the All Progressives Congress (APC) was the victor in the presidential election and that the opposition was the losers.

On Friday, he made a number of TVC and Silverbird appearances during which he made this declaration.

Olayinka’s comments were prompted by the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal’s decision that Bola Tinubu was lawfully elected.

He claimed it would be pointless to go to court for an election the PDP should have won easily.

“How do you prove malpractices in an election held in over 176,000 polling units?” is a reasonable question to ask given that you must call witnesses in all voting units where you allege anomalies.

Consider the following: “If you claim irregularities in 10,000 voting units, how do you plan on presenting testimony from 10,000 party agents?”

Therefore, it is best to do whatever is necessary within the law to win before going to the Tribunal, rather than waiting until you have lost before getting there.

It’s not sustainable to have one National Chairman and five Governors.

You’ve already laid the groundwork for failure, but you want the court to assist you make amends? One may well wonder, “Who does that?”

To paraphrase, “what should be happening is a rebuild towards 2027, with younger Nigerians at the lead,” rather than “wasting energies and resources, going from one court to the other in search of an electoral victory that the opposition threw away by itself.”