Ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu led the race for Nigeria’s presidency on Tuesday, according to partial official tallies issued after a tight election marred by frustration over long delays, technical hitches and charges that results have been manipulated.
The main opposition parties have called for the vote’s cancellation, describing the election as a “sham”.
With President Muhammadu Buhari stepping down, many Nigerians hoped Saturday’s vote would open the door to a leader able to tackle insecurity, ease economic malaise and root out poverty in Africa’s most populous country.
Tinubu, 70, a former Lagos governor from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party faced another veteran from main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, 76, making his sixth tilt at the presidency.
But a surprise third candidate, Labour Party’s Peter Obi, appealed to younger voters with a message of change. He has tested the dominance of the APC and PDP for the first time since military rule ended in 1999.
Both opposition parties called for the vote’s cancellation on Tuesday, alleging manipulation of results and demanding a new ballot.
“The election is irretrievably compromised and we have totally lost faith in the entire process,” Labour Party chairman Julius Abure told reporters along with representatives of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
“We demand that this sham of an election should be immediately cancelled,” Abure said. “We also call for a fresh election to be carried out.”
Tinubu leads
Counting continued early Tuesday, with 14 out of 36 states officially tallied.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said Tinubu had won six states, Abubakar five and Obi three.
Tinubu led with more than four million votes, while Abubakar had three million and Obi 1.6 million, according to national INEC figures.
INEC was expected to resume announcing results at 13:00 GMT.
The winning candidate has to garner the most votes nationally and score at least 25 percent in two-thirds of the states – a measure reflecting a country split between a mostly Muslim north and widely Christian south, and with three main ethnic groups.
Saturday’s election was mostly peaceful, but many polling stations opened late, angering voters, and delays or technical failures slowed uploading of results to an official INEC website meant to promote transparency.
PDP and other party officials stormed out of the counting centre on Monday night claiming tallies were manipulated. They said vote counts were not uploaded or did not match manual counts at local election stations.
Nigeria has a long history of vote rigging and ballot buying, although INEC had said new technology would help curtail malpractice.
“Elections in the past have been very discouraging so many of us have not been engaged, but this time, we thought it would be different,” said frustrated voter Osaki Briggs in southern Port Harcourt.
Fraud fears
Whoever replaces Buhari must quickly get to grips with Africa’s largest economy and top oil producer, which is beset by problems including a grinding jihadist war in the northeast and double-digit inflation.
Buhari, a former army general first elected in 2015, will step down after two terms in office. His critics say he failed in his key promises to make Nigeria safer.
For the 2023 election, INEC introduced biometric voter identification technology for the first time at national level and the IReV central database for results to improve transparency.
Votes were tallied by hand at local polling stations, with images of result sheets uploaded online to INEC’s IReV.
But long delays in voting getting under way and the slow pace of uploading state-by-state counting fuelled accusations of manipulation.
Some photographs of the result counts on the IReV system were blurry, smudged and illegible. By Tuesday 11:00 GMT, IReV had only uploaded results from 81,867 polling stations or less than half the 176,800 nationwide.
INEC said Sunday that problems with uploading results were due to “technical hitches” and there was no risk of tampering.
But international obervers, including from the European Union (EU), noted major logistical problems, disenfranchised voters and a lack of transparency by INEC.
The EU observer mission said the INEC “lacked efficient planning and transparency during critical stages” and reduced public trust with delays in voting and results.
Local observer group Yiaga said it conducted a parallel vote tabulation for the presidential election and would hold a press conference after official results were released.
“If the official results are manipulated at any point in the process we will be able to expose it,” it said.
In 2019, INEC was forced to delay the election by a week just hours before voting started. PDP’s Abubakar claimed fraud when Buhari beat him, but the supreme court later tossed out his claim.
Lagos victory
Still, the victory in Lagos State by Labour’s Obi underscored his surprise challenge to APC and PDP, which have governed Nigeria between them during Nigeria’s modern democracy.
With more than seven million registered voters, Lagos is a key state. It is also the political home of APC’s Tinubu, who governed Lagos from 1999 to 2007.
INEC said Obi won more than 582,000 votes in Lagos against around 572,000 for Tinubu.
Obi, 61, a former Anambra State governor, attracted younger voters with a campaign message of change from his two septuagenarian rivals.
Tinubu, known as the “Godfather of Lagos” for his influence, accepted defeat and urged his supporters to remain calm.
“You win some, you lose some,” he said.
