Eight days after Nigeria’s presidential election, the United States said that the process didn’t live up to Nigerians’ hopes.
Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was named the winner of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). He got 8,794,726 votes, which was almost two million more than his closest competitor, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Abubakar, who is 76 years old and has now run for president six times, got 6,984,520 votes. Peter Obi, who ran for the Labour Party (LP) and got young voters excited in a way that some people have called “unprecedented” in less than a year, got 6,101,533 votes.
But both Atiku and Obi have said that the presidential election was unfair and that they will go to court to change the result.
In a statement released on Sunday, US Ambassador to Nigeria Mary Beth Leonard said that many Nigerians are upset and angry about the results, while others are happy about victories they think were hard-fought and well-deserved.
The US Ambassador said, “It is clear that the election process as a whole on February 25 did not live up to Nigerians’ hopes.”
“As I said many times before the elections, Nigeria has done a lot in the more than two decades since it returned to democracy. One of these things is that the quality of its elections has gradually gotten better in that time.
“On February 25, the people of Nigeria showed how much they care about democracy, but there are also a lot of angry and frustrated Nigerians and a lot of people who are happy about victories they think were hard-fought and well-deserved.
“In the next few days, it will be important for this country’s future that Nigerians don’t let their disagreements tear them apart and that the legal process for resolving challenges to the election be allowed to work.”
The US envoy asked INEC to fix any problems that can be fixed quickly before the March 11 governorship elections. He also asked INEC to do a more thorough review of what went wrong in the last elections and what can be done to fix them.
She also praised Nigerians for showing how much they care about democracy, and she asked INEC to let the Nigerian public know what it is doing.
Leonard praised Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar for wanting to run for president in a legal way, and She also praised Bola Tinubu, who will be the next president, for recognizing their right to do so.
