He scored a total of 8,794,726 votes, the highest of all the candidates, thus meeting the first constitutional requirement to be declared the winner
The declaration of Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of Nigeria’s ruling party, All Progressives Congress by the Independent National Electoral Commission has sparked an outrage on social media.
Tinubu defeated 17 other candidates who took part in the election.
He scored a total of 8,794,726 votes, the highest of all the candidates, thus meeting the first constitutional requirement to be declared the winner.
He also scored over 25 per cent of the votes cast in 30 states, more than the 24 states constitutionally required.
INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, who announced the final results in the early hours of Wednesday in Abuja, said Atiku Abubakar of the PDP came second in the election.
Atiku polled a total of 6,984,520 votes in the election.
Peter Obi of the Labour Party came third in the election with a total of 6,101,533 votes while Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP came fourth with 1,496,687 votes.
However, some Nigerians have taken to social media to condemn the irregularities experienced during the Saturday’s poll, calling for revolution.
Below are some Twitter reactions in support of the agitation;
https://mobile.twitter.com/Kin
https://mobile.twitter.com/Cha
https://mobile.twitter.com/Inl
https://mobile.twitter.com/Nke
https://mobile.twitter.com/ibe
https://mobile.twitter.com/lex
https://twitter.com/bod_repurb
https://mobile.twitter.com/Dev
The word, revolution, in the political scene of Nigeria can be traced to Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC) in 2019 and now in 2023.
Sowore who is the convener of #RevolutionNow had called for a nationwide protest against bad governance.
He was subsequently arrested by men of the Department of State Services, a domestic intelligence agency with a history of repression on 3 August, 2019 ahead of a planned nationwide #RevolutionNow protest.
He was moved to the agency's headquarters in Abuja where he was illegally detained for 144 days despite different court orders issued for his release.
The DSS accused him of baseless crimes like money laundering and that he was plotting to overthrow President Muhammadu Buhari even though it failed to produce any evidence to substantiate its claim.
His detention was declared as arbitrary and illegal under international law by the United Nations Working Group on arbitrary detention, under the United Nation Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR).
The UN group lambasted the Nigerian government and asked it to stop the unlawful prosecution of the activist for his attempts to organise a peaceful protest in August of 2019.
It pointed out that the charges against him were quite vaguely defined and that such vagueness seems to have been used to make an ordinary exercise of freedoms sound like a threat to national security and a terrorist act.