The ruling party’s candidate Bola Tinubu has taken the lead in the race for Nigeria’s presidency after an irregular election that opposition parties want to be rerun, claiming the vote was marred by irregularities.
Early results on Tuesday, based on data from more than two-thirds of Nigeria’s 36 states, showed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress had won 7 million votes, and the main opposition candidate – Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party – had close to 6 million. .
Peter Obi, the Labor Party contender whose youth-focused campaign turned an ordinary two-party race into a competitive three-man battle, won the support of 3.8 million voters.
The tally puts Tinubu, 70, on course to replace president Muhammadu Buhari, also of the APC, as leader of Africa’s most populous country. But this weekend’s democracy exercise has been heavily criticized by opposition parties, civil society groups, international observers and former presidents.
Much of the anger was directed at the Independent National Electoral Commission, the body that oversees the vote and is responsible for collating results from nearly 177,000 polling stations across the country.
The long delay in collating the results, which are supposed to be uploaded quickly to INEC’s online portal, has fueled concerns that the loophole leaves plenty of room for vote tampering.
At a press conference in the capital Abuja, opposition parties denounced the “monumental disparity” between what they said was the actual vote and what was announced. He accused INEC of failing to fulfill its promise in the lead-up to the vote to upload the results in real time, which was meant to bring transparency to the opaque electoral process.
“The election was not free and far from fair or transparent,” said Labor party chairman Julius Abure, as he called for all votes to be annulled and rerun. He said INEC has been “irreversibly compromised” and demanded the resignation of Mahmood Yakubu.
Obi secured victory in Lagos state in a surprise result that underlined his appeal to young, educated and middle-class voters living in urban areas and in southern states. But if the results are genuine, he suggests that he cannot extend this popularity to the heavily populated north where the main parties are linked to regional power brokers.
Electoral officers collect election results at the offices of the Independent National Electoral Commission in Lagos © Akintunde Akinleye/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
INEC denied any wrongdoing but apologized for the delay in making the election results available. It blames the difficulties in the implementation of new technologies that have only been tried in small-scale elections.
Afolabi Adekaiyaoja, an analyst at the Center for Democracy and Development think-tank, said INEC has a duty to “ensure that there is clarity on how to address complaints and be ready to correct mistakes” before governors and states. legislative vote on March 11.
Former president Olusegun Obasanjo, who was Nigeria’s military leader in the 70s and returned as an elected head of state between 1999-2007, weighed in to say that “it is no secret that INEC officials . . . have been allegedly compromised to do what they should not have done.” can be used”, so that it returns to the manual transmission of the results so that it can be manipulated and treated.
He attacked the “greed, irresponsibility and unpatriotic behavior of those who allegedly gave money to INEC officials for perversion and those who collected blood money”, and called for some votes to be repeated.
Further condemnation from international observers, with a joint observer mission by the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute saying the election problem “undermined citizens’ confidence at a crucial time in [election] process”. The US-based organization said poor communication and lack of transparency by INEC had “created confusion and undermined voters’ trust in the process”.
The election was marred by violence in pockets of the country, particularly in Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital, where gunmen stole ballot boxes from polling centers and people were reportedly threatened to vote a certain way. Election results were also overturned in parliamentary races in several countries, raising uncertainty about the validity of the process.
In oil-rich Rivers state, one of the most electorate, election campaigning efforts were suspended after the official in charge said his life was under threat.
Mucahid Durmaz, senior Africa analyst at Verisk Maplecroft, a risk intelligence firm, said concerns about the election were so widespread that it could damage perceptions of Nigeria’s democracy.
“Attacks on polling stations and voter repression jeopardize the credibility of elections,” he said. “The electoral commission’s inability to manage the electoral process, and acute logistical and security problems have hampered efforts to conduct credible voting.”