Your job is to observe, not investigate, Keyamo slams EU over polls report

A former Minister of Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, has condemned the European Union Election Observation Missions (EU-EOM) over its final report on the 2023 general elections which indicted him of allegedly peddling fake news.

Keyamo, who was also the spokesman of the defunct All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council, was flagged in the EU report, alongside another council member, Femi Fani-Kayode, for spreading fake news during the 2023 elections.

The two APC chieftains were at the forefront of the media activities of the then-presidential candidate of the APC, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

While the EU report highlighted some noticeable flaws in the conduct of the last general elections, it also expanded its scope to cover campaign activities and other matters not directly related to the election, prompting criticisms from various quarters.

Reacting to the report, Keyamo scathingly faulted the EU for expanding its mission beyond the primary purpose of observing the election, maintaining that the Union was not invited to investigate or raise other issues.

In a statement on Wednesday, July 5, 2023, the former Minister reiterated that the EU-EOM mandate doesn't extend to investigating claims made by candidates against one another.

Titled, ‘My Response to the ‘Fake News’ Assertion by the EU Report,’ the statement said, “The part of the EU report that asserts that there was a single incident throughout the whole campaign where I retweeted a news item by a ‘suspicious website’ does not deserve my response because it is so presumptuous and outside their mandate and exposes a deep-seated bias about how the so-called observers went about their assignment.

“However, for the education of the gullible and unfortunate ones who are jubilating over such a poor report, I will say a word or two.”

Keyamo added that “Firstly, their assignment is to OBSERVE AND REPORT. Their mandate does not extend to INVESTIGATING claims made by candidates against one another and reaching CONCLUSIONS on such claims. They are not journalists nor are they law-enforcement officers.

“They are just OBSERVERS. Declaring any news as ‘fake’ when they don’t have alternative facts or findings by institutions statutorily empowered to investigate such claims is tantamount to taking sides on the campaign trail and trying to defend a candidate against another. And that is very disappointing and unfortunate on the part of these observers,” the statement partly read.