Nigeria: Bola Tinubu wins 2023 presidential elections

Nigeria: Bola Tinubu wins 2023 presidential elections.
Nigeria’s ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu was on Wednesday declared winner of the weekend presidential election by the electoral commission, after defeating two of his closest rivals.
Tinubu’s victory extends the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party’s grip on power in Africa’s top oil producer and most populous nation, though he inherits a litany of problems from president Muhammadu Buhari, also of APC.
The former governor of commercial hub Lagos polled 8.79m votes, ahead of main opposition challenger Atiku Abubakar’s 6.98m votes. Peter Obi, an outsider popular with younger voters, garnered 6.1m votes.
Nigerian electoral law says a candidate can win just by getting more votes than their rivals, provided they get 25% of the vote in at least two-thirds of the 36 states and the federal capital Abuja, which Tinubu also managed to do.
Tinubu, 70, and Abubakar, 76, are seen as traditional politicians representing Nigeria’s established political elite. Obi, 62, is considered a reformist who has reached across the country’s faultlines to woo voters from all communities and ran a slick social media campaign to attract the young.
With president Muhammadu Buhari stepping down, many Nigerians hoped Saturday’s vote would open the way to a leader able to tackle insecurity, ease economic malaise and manage poverty in their West African state.
Nigeria: Bola Tinubu wins 2023 presidential elections.
The voting was mostly peaceful, but was troubled by long delays at many polling stations, while technical hitches disrupted the uploading of results to a central website, fuelling concerns over vote rigging.
On Tuesday, Nigeria’s main opposition parties called for the presidential election to be scrapped, alleging that results showing the ruling party’s candidate in the lead had been manipulated.
Election officials said the results had been fully authenticated and government loyalists accused the opposition of fomenting “lawlessness and anarchy”.
However, international observers have also criticised Saturday’s vote, which was largely peaceful despite expectations of widespread chaos and violence.
A team of observers led by Joyce Banda, the former president of Malawi, said delays on voting day, which led to many polling stations opening hours late, meant the election “fell well short of Nigerian citizens’ reasonable expectations”.
An EU mission said the failures “reduced trust in the process and challenged the right to vote”.
Nigeria is contending with multiple intersecting crises, including economic turmoil, extremism and criminality affecting much of the country. In recent weeks, an effort to replace almost all Nigeria’s banknotes – in part to reduce the widespread practice of vote-buying – has caused massive economic disruption and much anger.
However, analysts point out that seven elections have been held in succession and some Nigerian democratic institutions are growing stronger. That none of the main candidates are former military officers – a first for a Nigerian poll – is also viewed as an achievement.
There have been concerns raised, however, about the limited number of women contesting the poll.
Evin Incir, the head of delegation of the European parliament, said: “I wish to express my concern that less than 10% of candidates were women. The next government and parliament should heed to the manifestos of the main political parties of Nigeria, which call for affirmative action, such as quotas.”
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report