Nigeria’s ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu has been officially declared the winner of the presidential election which ended this weekend, reported The Africa News.
According to results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission, All Progressives Congress (APC) party candidate Tinubu received 37% of the vote, or nearly 8.8 million, while main opposition candidate Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won 29% with almost 7 million. Abubakar also finished second in the last vote in 2019. Labour Party’s Peter Obi finished in third place with 25% of the vote, almost 6.1 million.
As per Nigeria’s electoral law, a candidate can win by getting more votes than their rivals, provided they get 25 percent of the vote in at least two-thirds of the 36 states and the federal capital Abuja.
Outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari congratulated Tinubu on the victory and said that he is the best person for the job. Buhari is stepping down after completing two presidential terms.
The opposition parties have rejected the voting results as the product of a flawed process, which suffered multiple technical difficulties owing to the introduction of new technology by INEC. The ruling party, on the other hand, has urged the opposition to accept defeat and not cause trouble.
The parties now have three weeks’ time to appeal the results. Notably, an election can be invalidated only if the national electoral body is found not to have followed the law and acted in ways that could have changed the result.
The voting result is likely to lead to a court challenge by the second and third-highest finishers, Abubakar and Obi. They had already called for the presidential election to be canceled and rerun, saying that it had been compromised by vote rigging and widespread violence. They have also called for the head of the election commission to step down.
