- By Kamil Opeyemi and Halimah Olamide
The candidate of the All Progressive Congress Bola Tibubu has been declared winner of the presidential election with a total of 8,794,726 votes polled from 12 states of the Federation.
Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission Prof Mahmud Yakubu, who is the chief Returning Officer, made the declaration saying the APC Candidate has met the criteria for the declaration.
Though Atiku Abubakar of Peoples Democratic Party and Peter Obi of the Labour Party also won in 12 states each, they polled lesser votes with Atiku recording 6,984,520 votes and Obi’s 6,101,533 votes.
But opposition parties had kicked saying there have been manipulations.
“We monitored with dismay the travesty to democracy exhibited at the collation centre of INEC. It is, to say the least, a rape on democracy.
“We are therefore constrained to state that INEC compromised the integrity of the election even before collation began … We have therefore arrived at the conclusion that the election has been irretrievably compromised.” said Julius Abure, the LP chairman, alleging widespread manipulation.
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”.
Already, there is celebration in the camp of the APC and Tinubu while calling on his opponents to accept defeat.
There are jubilation everywhere as members of the party heard the declaration by the commission.
On Tuesday, he was visited by former President Goodluck Jonathan and his Kenyan Counterpart Uhuru Kenyata.
It was more of a congratulatory gesture.
The INEC Chief also announced that a Certificate of Returns will be issued to Tinubu at exactly 3pm Wednesday.
Two time former Governor of Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos, held his last political appointment in 2007.
He has been known to be engaged in fixing appointees and having his eyes on te affairs of Lagos since then.
Twice he played crucial roles in the election of outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari.