By Political Editor
The Atiku Abubakar campaign council is optimistic that Nigeria’s February 25, 2023 presidential election will be nullified on the grounds of alleged ballot rigging.
Atiku, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Peter Obi of the Labour Party are challenging the outcome of the election which produced the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as president-elect.
Nigeria’s electoral umpire, INEC, declared Tinubu as the winner of the election amid protests by opposition political parties who claimed there were discrepancies in the collated figures from different states.
INEC’s failure to electronically transmit the results of the election from 176,606 polling units to a public portal as mandated in the commission’s regulations and guidelines, formed part of the grounds for dispute by the parties that lost.
Speaking in a tweet on Friday, a spokesperson for the Atiku campaign, Daniel Bwala, said Nigeria would become the African country to nullify a presidential election after Kenya and Malami.
“When the Supreme Court Kenya annulled the presidential elections for the first time in Africa, this was what was said “This is indeed a very historic day for the people of Kenya and by extension to the people of the continent of Africa”,” said Bwala.
“For the first time in the history of African democratization, a ruling has been made by a court nullifying irregular election of a president. It marked a watershed in the continent of Africa that democracy would survive. After that, the Supreme Court in Malawi followed suit. Nigeria is next, save this post,” he added.
In 2017, Kenya became the third country in the world and the first in Africa to nullify a presidential election after Austria, the Maldives and Russia.
The East African country’s Supreme Court declared President Uhuru Kenyatta’s re-election null and void despite some international observers’ rating of the election as free and fair.
Malawi’s former president, Peter Mutharika, was sacked by a constitutional court after being declared winner of the 2019 presidential election that was held in the country.
The court annulled the presidential election results, citing evidence of irregularities, and ordered fresh elections be held within 150 days. In the rerun, Mutharika lost to Lazarus Chakwera.
