Tinubu leads in Nigeria's hotly contested presidential poll

By Olanrewaju Kola

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AA) — Nigeria's candidate for the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) party, Bola Tinubu is leading in a hotly contested presidential election, according to preliminary results released by the country's electoral commission on Tuesday.

Tinubu has received over 6 million votes ahead of his rivals: Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who has over 4 million votes and the Labour Party's Peter Obi who has over 3 million votes.

As of Tuesday afternoon, results from 22 out of the 36 states across the nation in West Africa had been counted.

Opposition parties have rejected the results, however, alleging that the electoral body breached the law on procedures for the collation, upload, and release of results.

Collation is done manually as opposed to upload to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) server from Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for everyone to see, said Dino Malaye, a PDP representative at the INEC National Collation Centre, in Abuja. "This is a breach of the 2023 Electoral Law and we reject the results released so far."

There is anxiety across the country on the credibility of the outcome of the election on Saturday after reports of violence, ballot theft, late arrival of voting materials and failure of accreditation machines.

Thabo Mbeki, the head of International Election Observers Groups and former South African president, has called for restraint.

"The time now is for restraint and continued patience as we await the final results," declared Mbeki, who leads the Commonwealth Observers team.

Authorities are expected to release the final results late on Tuesday.

- Appeal for rectification

Meanwhile, Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has appealed for caution and for errors committed by electoral officials to be rectified. Speaking on a local broadcaster, Obasanjo said tension was building up in the country over the manual counting of votes.

He appealed to outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari to allow for all ballots that did not meet credibility and transparency standards to be cancelled.

Obasanjo said Buhari had proved beyond reasonable doubt that he would want to leave a legacy of free, fair, transparent, and credible elections but that the electoral body's decision to return to manual transmission of results after investing in an electronic system that allowed instant transmission from polling units was unfortunate. He said the manual system could be easily manipulated and the results doctored.

*Hassan Isilow contributed to this report from Johannesburg, South Africa.