Youth Favorite Peter Obi Declares Himself Nigerian President-Elect, Challenges Election Results

Nigeria's Labour Party's Presidential Candidate Peter Obi speaks during a forum "Nigeria's
AP Photo/Kin Cheung
John Hayward

Peter Obi, the third-party candidate for Nigeria’s presidency who seemed to hold a commanding lead in the polls but came in a distant third in last weekend’s balloting, announced Thursday that he will file a legal challenge against the results.

The candidate from the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) party, Bola Tinubu, was declared the winner with 37 percent of the vote on Wednesday, which would make him the first president in Nigerian history to win with less than 50 percent of the vote. 

Tinubu’s major-party rival, Atiku Abubakar, of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) won 29 percent of the vote. Obi, who originally belonged to PDP but ran under the banner of the tiny Labor Party, won 25 percent.

“Mr. Tinubu’s victory confounded most pollsters, who had put Mr Obi well ahead in the race to lead Africa’s biggest economy and most populous country,” the Economist noted on Thursday, with the caveats that most of those pre-election polls included large numbers of undecided voters, and Obi’s lead was built on massive support from young voters who do not always make it to the voting booth on Election Day.

The Economist also found it a bit odd that Tinubu could notch a solid victory as the candidate of a party that has been in power for eight years, during which “Nigerians on average have grown poorer, while violence, separatism, and insecurity have risen.”

Nigeria has a long and mournful history of ballot box stuffing, violent suppression of voters, and post-election violence after the losers refuse to accept the results but this time was supposed to be different because faster and more secure voting machines would be used. Unfortunately, what transpired last Saturday was closer to the traditional untrustworthy chaos:

There were problems right from the start. An hour after voting began on February 25th one-third of polling stations were still not open, according to monitors from the Centre for Democracy and Development, an NGO based in Abuja, the capital. At some stations officials had inadequate materials. Some polling units were attacked by armed men in battleground states like Lagos, Kano and Rivers. There were also reports of voter intimidation, vote-buying, the snatching of ballot boxes and the burning of ballot papers. All of this undoubtedly reduced turnout. Only a quarter of registered voters cast their ballots, a lower share than the 35% turnout in the previous election in 2019.

The counting was also haphazard. The system for transmitting results suffered widespread failures. At the time of publishing this article not all of the results had been uploaded. Many of them were illegible and incorrectly labelled. Some agents accidentally sent in selfies instead of the tally sheets they were meant to.

Unhappy voters flooded social media with photos of results announced at their polling stations, attempting to show discrepancies with those announced at higher levels. Party officials also shared pictures of handwritten forms that appeared to be scribbled over and rewritten. At a Lagos collation center one Labor Party official complained that her colleague signed the results at gunpoint. In Rivers state the electoral officer paused the count after receiving death threats.

Both PDP and Labor immediately said they would not recognize Tinubu’s victory, and on Thursday, Obi said Labor would make that official with a court challenge:

After thanking his supporters, “especially the youth,” for their efforts on his behalf and encouraging them to stay involved, Obi said the election was rigged, or “programmed for determined results.”

“The election that we just witnessed has been conducted and results announced as programmed. It is a clear violation of the electoral rules and guidelines as we were promised,” he said.

“This election did not meet the minimum standard expected of a free, transparent, credible fair election. It will go down as one of the most controversial elections ever conducted in Nigeria,” he declared.

Obi cited the example of a voter named Efidi Bina Jennifer, who was stabbed in the face when a pack of thugs attacked a polling place in Lagos, but she still insisted on voting, making her a hero to many Nigerians:

“I had been so willing to vote, so I said they had done the worst they could do. So I alighted from my car and went straight to the ballot box to cast my vote,” Jennifer said in an interview on Tuesday. She refused to say who she voted for, but Obi scored a surprise victory in Lagos, which was previously seen as a Tinubu stronghold.

Obi hailed the redoubtable voter as “Lady Jennifer” and said her story gave him “courage to believe that a new Nigeria is indeed possible.”

“The good and hardworking people of Nigeria have again been robbed by our supposed leaders whom they trusted. However, very humbly, I must appeal to all Nigerians to remain peaceful, law-abiding, and conduct themselves in the most responsible manner,” he said.

Obi said he and his running mate, Dr. Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, were “undaunted and committed to the project of a new Nigeria that will be built on honesty, transparency, fairness, justice, equity.”

“I assure the good people of Nigeria that we will explore all legal and peaceful options to recall our mandate. We won the election, and we will prove it to Nigerians,” he declared.

Under Nigerian law, Obi has 21 days from Wednesday to present his challenge in court. The BBC noted he did not indicate what evidence he possesses that the election was rigged, and he might have a difficult time persuading the court that the known irregularities – including voting machine failures and violence at the polls – were enough to account for Tunubu’s lead of 1.8 million votes.

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