“The provisions of the current electoral law have been completely violated,” Abubakar said. “This protest is going to continue for a long time, every day or every other day.”
At least five political parties are challenging last month’s vote, claiming delays in uploading results from the country’s 177,000 polling stations to the electoral body’s portal could have by voting. They also claim that voters were intimidated and cases where people were prevented from voting at all.
Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress won the election with 37% of the votes to become the first presidential candidate in Nigeria to win with less than half of the total votes.
In Nigeria, an election can only be invalidated if it is proven that the national electoral body did not substantially follow the law and acted in ways that could have resulted in to change None of Nigeria’s presidential election results have ever been overturned by the country’s Supreme Court.
Some observers have also criticized the conduct of the presidential election. The US ambassador to Nigeria, Mary Beth Leonard, said the election process failed to meet the expectations of Nigerians after years of improvement in the quality of elections.
“Therefore we reiterate our call (the Electoral Commission) to quickly address the challenges that can be resolved before the gubernatorial elections on March 11,” she said in a statement on Sunday.
A local court on Friday allowed Atiku and third place finisher Peter Obi to examine the election materials used in the vote as part of their court challenge.
The two opposition parties will in the coming weeks collect evidence to make their cases in separate applications disputing the election results, a process that took almost seven months in 2019 when the courts rejected a similar challenge the results.
