The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC has declared the Presidential Candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the President-elect of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
The INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu said at about 4.10 am Wednesday that as the chief returning officer for the presidential election, he certified the election that was contested on Saturday February 25.
After giving a breakdown of the figures polled by each of the 18 presidential candidates, he declared Tinubu elected as Nigeria’s president having satisfied the requirements of the law.
The keenly contested presidential election concluded with official results from 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja finally compiled in the early hours of Wednesday.
According to him, Tinubu’s APC won with 8,794 726, PDP came second with 6,984,520, and Labour Party 6,101,533 while NNPP scored 1,490 687 according to results presented by state collation officers for the presidential election (SCOPs) before the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Mahmood Yakubu, at the National Collation Centre in Abuja, from 36 states and the FCT.
According to Section 134 of the Nigerian Constitution, a presidential candidate can only be announced as the winner if he or she has the majority of votes cast at the election; and has not less than one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in at least two-thirds of all the States in the Federation and the FCT.
Sub-section 3 of the same section states explicitly that “in default of a candidate duly elected in accordance with subsection (2) of this section there shall be a second election”.
LP, PDP call for cancellation of Feb 25 elections
Meanwhile, earlier on Tuesday, the Vice-Presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP), Ifeanyi Okowa and Datti Baba-Ahmed held a joint briefing calling for the cancellation of the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly elections.
The pair called the election “a sham”, saying it was “neither free nor fair”. According to the statement of their press briefing at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja on Tuesday, the PDP and LP candidates accused the National Chairman of INEC of “playing out a predetermined script”.
The statement partly reads,
“On Saturday, the 25th of February, 2023, Nigerians from the different parts of our great country braced all manner of challenges to cast their votes for their preferred candidates. And having cast their votes, they are expectantly awaiting the results of the presidential and National Assembly election. We wish to state for the records that last weekend’s election was a sham. It was neither free nor fair. What played out yesterday at the National Collation Center exposes the National Chairman of playing to a predetermined script. Our position remains that the election and transmission of the results must be in tandem with the Electoral Act and the INEC guidelines.
There is no doubt that INEC is under a statutory obligation to transmit election results electronically. Paragraph 38 of the INEC manual made pursuant to section 149 of the Electoral Act 2022 and the 1999 constitution as amended provides for this. That paragraph, which deals with the transmission of results at the polling units, is crucial, and it imposes statutory obligations on the part of INEC to upload polling units results on its portal.
There is no doubt that polling units results are the pyramid upon which other results are built. Therefore, it is required that the moment polls come to a close and the results are declared, the results must be uploaded on INEC server or portal.
The law is that where the law has set out the procedures to be followed, that procedure and no other must be followed.
The argument that INEC guidelines have no force of law is idle and wayward arguments. This is not even the question of alterations of the results. It is a question of non-compliance with mandatory statutory provisions. The argument that it is only when the Chief Electoral Officer of the Federation announces the winner of the Presidential election that the results can be uploaded on the INE C portal cannot be correct. There must be uploading of results at the polling units after the polling officers had announced the winner at the polling units.
Finally, we call on the commission to thread on the path of honour by cancelling the election outright and commence the process of a fresh election that will not only be credible but will be seen to be credible by Nigerians.”
