Nigerian parties rejected the results of the presidential elections that took place on February 25, which was won by the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, Paula Ahmed Tinubu, and opposition accusations of election fraud raised fears of violence in the country, which has been facing security unrest for more than a decade.
The main competitor, Atiq Abu Bakr, who came in second place, denounced what he described as “the rape of democracy” as a result of “unprecedented” fraud in the ballot in which the ruling party candidate, Tinubu, won.
The candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, who is especially popular among young people, told reporters in Abuja that “the manipulation and fraud that accompanied these elections is unprecedented in the history of our nation,” as he put it.
Abu Bakr won about 7 million votes, but he and other parties say that the election commission’s announcement of Tinubu’s victory is true evidence of a fake election.
The political opposition had called for the elections to be annulled even before they took place.
Abu Bakr considered that the results announced by the National Elections Commission were “blatantly biased” in favor of Tinubu (70 years), who officially won the presidential elections with more than 8.8 million votes, equivalent to 36% of the total votes.
Tinubu’s victory extends the PNC’s control over power in Africa’s largest country in terms of population and the most oil-producing, but – at the same time – it inherits a series of problems from former President Muhammadu Buhari, who belongs to the same party, most notably the faltering economy and the activities of armed groups, as well as on the spread of poverty among the population.
“The 2023 elections are fair and free, and the competition in them is fierce, and the results were not falsified,” Aisha Abu Bakr, protocol and media official for the campaign of the winning candidate in Nigeria’s elections, told Al Jazeera.
It is noteworthy that 18 candidates participated in the presidential elections, but the competition was limited to the candidates of the ruling party, the People’s Democratic Party and the Labor Party.
