After the final results of presidential elections were announced in 14 of Nigeria’s 36 states, Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressive Congress Party (APC) led the election on Tuesday night amid growing dissatisfaction with the electoral process.
Mr. Tinubu has received about 7 million votes so far, 36 percent of the total, according to Reuters calculations.
Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), comes in second with nearly 6 million votes and a 30 percent share.
Challenger Peter Obi of the rebel Labor Party has about 3.8 million votes and 20 percent of the vote.
The final vote count is expected later this week, when either a new president is announced or a runoff is initiated.
Who are the candidates?
Mr. Tinubu is a former accountant who served as governor of Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, from 1999 to 2007. He was forced into exile by the military regime of Sani Abacha in 2008. The former governor is one of the richest politicians in Nigeria and has to deny accusations of corruption.
Mr. Abubakar is running for his sixth presidential election after winning the previous five. But he was vice president from 1999 to 2007, overseeing the economic reform program. The 76-year-old made his fortune from the oil tycoon and has also been accused of corruption, which he denies.
Mr. Obi is the outsider of the three, spurred on by an idealistic campaign he describes as “old versus new” that has won him the support of much younger voters. He is also a wealthy businessman, but with a reputation for respectability.
What is the counting process?
Results from 176,846 polling stations are manually counted and then sent electronically to the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Abuja, which publishes them on its website.
Points are also calculated at the level of departments, municipalities and states. A returning official from each state travels to Abuja with the vote count, which will be compared with the results sent directly from the polling stations to the National Collection Centre.
Once the counts of all states and the Federal Territory of Abuja have been verified, the chairman of inec will announce the national results and announce the winner.
What do candidates need to win?
To win the presidential election, a candidate needs a simple majority if he receives at least a quarter of the votes in at least 24 states. If no candidate passes, a second round is held within 21 days.
what problems
Opposition parties have dismissed findings that show Mr. Tinubu’s leadership is the result of a flawed process that has suffered from several technical problems due to the implementation of new technologies by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
Inec promised that in the election to replace outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari, it would upload the results of each constituency directly to its website, but most failed to do so immediately.
As with previous surveys, this meant manual collection of results from departmental and municipal census centers, which was also criticized by the monitoring missions for poor planning.
At a press conference in the capital Abuja on Tuesday, the three main opposition parties said the election was an affront to democracy and called for the resignation of Nigeria’s campaign leader.
“The conduct of the 2023 elections was marred by massive violence, manipulation, voter intimidation, voter fraud and voter irregularities reported by the national electoral body,” said Labor Party leader Julius Abure. Party.
During the press conference, dozens of protesters took to the streets of Abuja and the southern state of Delta, accusing the electoral commission of disenfranchising voters.
There are fears that disappointment in the process could lead to the violence that erupted in Nigeria’s previous elections.
With additional agency reporting
Source: I News
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