Vote counting continues with results from 14 of Nigeria’s 36 states
28 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has asked the electoral commission to repeat the votes in the “violent” areas of the country, in a statement in which he has warned that Nigeria is in “danger and risk” if the errors made in the elections are not rectified. voting on Saturday.
“It is difficult for me to speak at this point,” the former president began in a letter. “Until the night of Saturday, February 25, the good and noble plans and preparations for the elections seemed to be going well (…) It is not a secret that the officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission of Nigeria (NIEC) have been allegedly corrupted at an operational level, to make what should have worked not work, and reverse the manual transmission of results, which has been tampered with and the results tampered with,” he said.
Obasanjo has referred to the new vote digitization systems that Nigeria has made available to its citizens these elections, such as the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the results portal, where the vote count is dumped .
The statement appeals directly to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who Obasanjo says will want to leave a legacy of legal and transparent elections. For this reason, he asks him to annul the results that do not pass “the credibility and transparency tests”, and to repeat the votes of the regions in which they have been altered, he proposes the date for next Saturday, March 4. He also demands that the officials in charge of the BVAS and the results portal be replaced.
MORE ACCUSATIONS OF IRREGULARITIES
This Monday, the European Union Electoral Observation Mission in Nigeria warned in a preliminary report of the lack of transparency of these elections of the lack of confidence in the CNEI, citing the delays in the electoral processes, as well as the scarcity of information about the results portal that you have.
Also members of the opposition parties, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labor Party, have expressed their dissatisfaction with how the vote count is being monitored. This Monday the representatives of the PDP and the Labor Party withdrew from the Center of the National Coalition, where the official results are being published. “We have asked the Electoral Commission to give us the results that are on the portal as promised, but they have refused,” reproached Dino Melaye, from the PDP.
THE COUNT OF THE VOTES ADVANCES
While the controversy continues, the vote count is moving slowly. The latest data shows that the candidate Bola Tinubu, from the governmental Congress of All Progressives (APC), who with 4,105,663 votes is the winner in six of the 14 states that have published their results, according to the CNEI, is the winner.
He is followed by the candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, with 3,052,625 and victory in five states. Peter Obi, of the Labor Party, is in third place in the electoral race, with 1,640,124 and victory in three states, including Lagos.
