ABUJA: Nigeria’s opposition leader Atiku Abubakar who came as runner-up in the February 25 presidential poll, took to the streets on Monday accompanied by his supporters to oppose the election results.
Last week, the electoral body announced Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the polls to take over from President Muhammadu Buhari in May last year.
Almost 25 million people cast a mostly peaceful vote but were marred by technical glitches and long delays, and annoying voters and opposition parties who declared it a massive vote-rigging.
Supporters of Abubakar and members of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) dressed in black to walk to the headquarter of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the capital Abuja and submitted a petition, claiming a huge electoral fraud.
The PDP chairman Iyorchia Ayu has said that INEC had direct involvement in abetting and aiding the massive rigging and manipulation of the election results in support of the ruling party.
Nigeria’s opposition alleges huge electoral fraud
Another PDP leader, Baraka Sani, who was surrounded by his supporters with banners saying “Save our democracy” and “INEC is corrupt”, said that it was really an appalling situation.
The commission, however, acknowledged technical shortcomings on the polling day but rejected claims of fraud and rigging.
The Labour Party’s Peter Obi, who grabbed the third slot in the presidential election, also rejected the results and remarked he was going to the apex court to prove to the masses that he had won the presidential run.
Contesting for a sixth time, “Atiku,” as Abubakar is known, has not clearly mentioned that he would also reach out to the court, but he was consulting lawyers to “decide his next line of action.”
In a bid to improve transparency and discourage rigging, INEC this year launched a biometric voter identification system for the first time at the national level as well as IReV, a central online database system for uploading results.
However, scores of voters and opposition party members said the new system failed when uploading tallies allowed for ballot manipulation and also, there were disparities between the online and manual results.
Meanwhile, issues with the new technology also resulted in long queues and delays, discouraging many from voting.
With registered voters numbering 93.4 million, the turnout was just around 27 percent, even less than in the election held in 2019.
INEC tried to address some of the concerns raised by voters and parties before key governorship and local assembly elections on Saturday.
