The campaign office of the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has accused some opposition political parties of peddling misinformation to confuse Nigerians ahead of the 2023 general elections.
The campaign office said this on Saturday, saying it never entered into a “political deal” to support the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar.
The office in a statement made available to journalists in Abuja described the speculations as the handwork of charitable propagandists who engage in distortion of facts in the pursuit of imaginary relevance for their paymasters.
The Obi campaign office said that “Rather than strive to contend with the hard sell of their candidates, these mischief makers bandy about misleading accounts of the issue-based messages of our candidates just to score cheap political points and thus distract the discerning public.
“While we understand the frustration of dealing in their hard-to-sell, “expired milk” in a competitive market, the Fair Play rule demands that you don’t associate the good with the bad product. We demand honour even among thieves.
“We know the intention of the spin-doctors in selling an utterly false story that the highflying Labour Party candidate, Peter Obi, met with his PDP counterpart and reached a deal. Nothing can be further from the truth.”
The campaign office also maintained that “Obi’s foreign trip, its motive, and where and who to meet are already in the public domain; his meeting in the UK with some Nigerian political leaders is visually seen by all.
“But mischievous propagandists prefer to concoct lies in a desperate effort to clean up their candidate. If Obi’s mission is to rescue Nigeria from the old order, he ought to be seen working for the changing order.
“Obi’s respect for Atiku or any leader in this country has more to do with his sound upbringing and the fact that his style of politics is devoid of hate and bitterness and should not be misconstrued to be cavorting the spent order represented by the competition.”
