Nigeria is going through hours of uncertainty, with the partial and preliminary results of the presidential election bringing victory to the man in the ruling party, Bola Tinubu, after a tedious electoral process. The parties of the other two main candidates called for the result to be annulled and a re-vote, while demonstrations against and in favor of the role of the Election Commission took place in the streets of the capital Abuja.
The winner will be declared in the first round if he obtains at least 25% of the vote in 25 of the 37 constituencies (36 states and the capital Abuja).
Recent polls pointed to a possible victory for the man who runs out (for the small Labor Party), Peter Obi, and the first results, released on Monday, attributed the victory to the candidate favored by urban youth, in Lagos, the most populous. Though by a slim margin of about 10,000 votes, the result was in line with opinion polls and left Bola Tinubu, the APC candidate, in power, second in the state where he had been governor between 1999 and 2007.
Another symbolic defeat for Tinubu was in Katsina, the home state of outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari, in this case against Atiku Abubakar of the PDP, the party that shares power with the APC.
According to Reuters, Tinubu won 34% of the vote in 33 of the 37 constituencies.
However, the results – seeped through technical difficulties – began to turn around for Tinubu, aged 70, with a convincing result in Oyo state, whose capital, Ibadan, is the third largest in terms of population. About 24 hours later, according to Reuters data based on data the agency obtained from 33 states, Tinubu’s victory seemed certain, with 34%, or 7.6 million valid votes, in a country of 93 million voters.
Saturday’s poll was marked by major delays in the opening of many polling places, as well as technical issues that disrupted uploading votes to a central site, forcing the process to be done manually in many places, causing delays and fueling doubts about voice manipulation. That is exactly what former president Olusegun Obasanjo concluded, who asked current president Buhari on Monday evening to scrap “elections that fail the test of credibility and transparency”.
The following day, after alleged vote rigging, the PDP and Labor demanded that the result of the vote be eliminated and a new election held. “We demand that this farce be stopped immediately,” said Labor Party chairman Julius Abure. He also announced that he will challenge the result of the election in court after also saying that among his members, some were not allowed to vote, others were forcibly evicted from polling stations, others still saw ballots and ballot boxes destroyed .
The challenge of the election result is nothing new: in 2019 Abubakar, then in second place, appealed to the court to review the results, but without success.
Source: DN
