If ‘real votes’ were counted in Rivers, I would have won—Peter Obi

Labour Party Presidential candidate at the February 25 presidential polls, Peter Obi on Monday said he would have won the election if the “real votes” were counted in Rivers state.

Peter Obi who disclosed this while appearing on Arise TV, said people who voted for him did not do so on the basis of ethnicity, noting that the electorate knew what he stood for.

He added that he even got more votes from Lagos indigenes than those referred to as “visitors.”

“In the South-East, it is a similar situation, people know me, people know what I stand for, people know I have kept my promises. People know I’ve kept to what I have said.

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“It is a simple thing, people go about and say, ‘Oh! He got votes in Lagos because of the Igbo’, and I ask how many Igbos live in Lagos? I got more votes from indigenes in Lagos than those who you can call visitors. Are the Igbo in Nasarawa? Are the Igbo in Plateau? Are the Igbo in Abuja?” he asked.

Obi added, “In Rivers, where you know that the governor came out against me and everything, I still… If the real votes of Rivers were counted, Reuben, I won. I had over 50 percent of the vote. The other two parties were sharing the others.”

In Rivers, President-elect Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress won after polling a total of 231,591 votes from the 23 local government areas of the state.

APC polled 231,591 votes, the Labour Party scored 175,071 and the PDP got 88,468.