Weeks after the Nigerian presidential election, many citizens are still holding onto hope that their preferred candidate will be declared the winner by the court, which is seen as the last hope of the common man. However, it is important to note that according to the laws of the land, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has already conducted, concluded, and declared the winner of the election. While the electoral umpire is bound by the law to review some of its decisions as demanded by political parties during the collation of results, INEC has already done its job.
The election was marred by cases of irregularities, vote suppression, massive rigging, and manipulations such as the rewriting of results and destruction of ballot boxes. During the collation of results at the national collation center of INEC in Abuja, some political parties staged a walkout over the Commission’s refusal to halt collation of results and review the process. Despite this, INEC went ahead with the process and announced Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the election.
Tinubu reportedly polled a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat his closest rivals, Atiku and Obi of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who scored 6,984,520 and 6,101,533 votes respectively. However, the presidential candidates of the Labour Party (LP) and PDP, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar, respectively, have expressed their intent to go to court. Obi has categorically stated that he won the election and expressed hope of reclaiming his allegedly stolen mandate at the apex court, vowing to do whatever is necessary within the law.
It is worth noting that hardly any presidential election is annulled in Nigeria, despite the fact that after every election, there must be some form of challenge to the results and fairness of the process. However, there have been two
