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Bola Ahmed Tinubu arriving at a polling station in Lagos
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JAMES OATWAY/ REUTERS
Regardless of protests by the opposition, the candidate of the governing party All Progressives Congress (APC) has been declared the winner of the presidential election in Nigeria: Bola Ahmed Tinubu received 8.8 million votes and thus clearly the most votes, the election commission announced on Wednesday.
At the same time, the candidate from the social democratic APC party received at least 25 percent of the votes in two-thirds of the 36 states - and thus fulfilled the second requirement to be declared the winner.
Tinubu "complied with the requirements of the law and is therefore declared the winner and elected," said the president of the electoral commission, Mahmood Yakubu.
According to the information, the two most important opposition candidates ended up behind Tinubu, whose parties had previously made serious allegations against the election process and called for it to be cancelled.
According to the election commission, Atiku Abubakar from the largest opposition party PDP received 6.9 million votes.
The Labor Party's Peter Obi got 6.1 million votes.
Both parties had called for the polls to be canceled on Tuesday and spoke of a "sham election".
The "entire election" was "irretrievably compromised," they explained, among other things, with reference to problems with the count.
Almost 90 million eligible voters were called on Saturday to nominate President Muhammadu Buhari's successor.
After two terms in office, he was not allowed to run again.
In addition to the President, both chambers of Parliament were re-elected.
During the election campaign, 70-year-old Tinubu promised to modernize the public infrastructure.
Basic facilities such as the water supply or public housing are ailing.
The economy of the resource-rich country is to grow as a result of the modernization.
A small but certainly painful setback for Tinubu is the defeat in his political stronghold Lagos.
It was already announced on Monday that Obi won the majority there.
Tinubu is the former governor of Lagos.
Nigeria is currently facing enormous challenges: inflation in Africa's largest economy and main oil producer is in the double digits.
In addition, there is violence in the north-east of the country, where jihadists have been fighting for their own state for 14 years.
According to UN figures, the conflict has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced around two million people since 2009.
aar/AFP/dpa
