Bola Tinubu declared Nigeria’s president-elect

Bola Tinubu, the former governor of Lagos state and longstanding kingmaker in Nigerian politics, has been declared the winner of the 2023 presidential election which major opposition parties have rejected as a sham.

The electoral commission, Inec, said Mr Tinubu, 70, scored 37% of the vote, extending the reign of his ruling All Progressives Congress. Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party polled 29% while Labour Party’s Peter Obi got 25%.

The two opposition parties, supported by smaller ones, have called for the cancellation of the vote saying it was marred by vote theft, violence and voter suppression.

By 10am Wednesday, hours after Mr Tinubu was declared winner, 26% of election results from polling centres had not been updated on Inec’s website, contrary to guidelines demanding they be transmitted electronically to avoid manipulation of results.

The opposition parties say the failure to upload them had allowed results to be tampered with. Voters have provided several evidence of irregularities during voting and inaccuracies with the results.

The Independent National Electoral Commission said all complaints should be taken to court, a call backed by President Muhammadu Buhari who has congratulated Mr Tinubu.

In an early morning acceptance speech Wednesday, Mr Tinubu called for reconciliation with his opponents.

“I take this opportunity to appeal to my fellow contestants to let us team up together. It is the only nation we have. It is one country and we must build it together,” he said in a televised speech.

He said that they had the right to challenge the results in court but said that the lapses in the election “were relatively few in number and were immaterial to affect the outcome of this election”.

– Numbers to note

In the final tally, Inec said Mr Tinubu got 8.7 million votes; Mr Abubakar got 6.9 million and Mr Obi won 6.1 million. A candidate must win the most votes, as well as at least 25 percent of the vote in two-thirds of the nation’s 36 states.

– Learn more

Mr Tinubu, a former accountant with Mobil and Deloitte & Touche, is one of Nigeria’s richest politicians. He was involved in the fight against military rule in Nigeria and fled into exile during the iron-fist rule of the dictator Sani Abacha, before helping to midwife the return to democracy in 1999 after Mr Abacha’s death.

Mr Tinubu was governor of Lagos between 1999 and 2007 and continued to wield immense political influence in the state and the southwest region, playing a lead role in the emergence of his three successors.

Mr Tinubu based his campaign on his record of rebuilding Lagos, but he was defeated there by Mr Obi in a major upset of the election. The APC candidate won in most other states in his native southwest region.

He is expected to be sworn into office on May 29 when President Buhari steps down after two terms in office, marked by horrendous insecurity and economic failures.

The new president will have the task of solving those problems, and a cash crisis triggered by new currency rollout by the outgoing government just months before the election. The naira shortage caused widespread suffering amongst the country’s 2010 million people.

Mr Tinubu will also face fuel and electricity shortages as well as high inflation, unemployment and huge debt left by the Buhari administration. He will also have to unite a country divided by a bitter electioneering that frequently touched on the country’s sensitive fault lines of ethnicity and religion.