Nigeria’s ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu has taken an early lead in the voting results of elections held on Saturday, reported The East African.
Former Lagos governor Tinubu faced the main opposition party PDP’s Atiku Abubakar and Labour Party’s Peter Obi in Saturday’s vote.
With 14 out of 36 states tallied and vote counting still underway, Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said Tinubu had won 6 states, Abubakar won 5 states and Obi won 3 states.
According to INEC figures, Tinubu was ahead with more than 3.8 million votes, Abubakar had 3 million, and Obi had 1.6 million.
According to Nigeria’s electoral laws, candidates must win the most overall votes along with 25 percent of ballots cast in two-thirds of states.
In related news, the head of the ECOWAS Observation Mission to Nigeria on Monday said the voting process was marred by irregularities.
Ernest Bai Koroma, the head of the ECOWAS mission, said the late start of voting beyond the 8:30 a.m. opening time due to the late arrival of polling officials, voting materials, and in some cases, the delivery of wrong materials at polling stations across the country were some of the issues noted by observers in the field.
As a result, people continued casting ballots on Sunday even though the general election should have ended on Saturday.
Koroma said that representatives of major political parties were present at most polling stations.
“The All People’s Congress, the All Progressive Party, the APC, the People’s Democratic Party, the Labour Party, and the New Nigeria People’s Party were present in most of the polling stations as a visible absence of most of the other party agents in the rest of these stations,” he said.
Some of the presidential candidates have also raised concerns, through their supporters and parties, about irregularities during the vote.
Koroma urged Nigeria’s presidential election candidates to respect the outcome of the polls.
