APC’s Bola Tinubu declared winner of 2023 Presidential Election

Bola Tinubu

The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu in the early hours of Wednesday, March 1st, declared candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the winner of the 2023 presidential elections and the President-elect.

Bola Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes as against Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who got 6,984,520 and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, who polled 6,101,533 votes.

Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) scored 1,496,687 votes.

Watch Tinubu’s full acceptance speech here (Start at 9:40 mark).

The announcement comes after several political parties, including the PDP and LP staged a walkout as collation of results began, arguing that there was widespread rigging across the country.

The were also a number of cases of ballot box snatching and destruction, attacks on voters, and non availability of INEC officers in some polling units.

The biggest issue with the election, according to Nigerians on social media, is that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), which was supposed to be used to upload results straight from the polling units, failed to do so. Many Nigerians reported the device showing “Server Error”.

As at press time, only 128,542 of the 176,846 polling unit results have been uploaded, almost four days after the election, with Nigerians stating that what was uploaded was different from the actual results from their polling units.