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https://www.ft.com/content/0042ba7e-be34-4156-8d78-91fb461aaf6f
Outsider candidate Peter Obi took an early scalp in the battle to become Nigeria’s president as he won victory in Lagos, the country’s economic powerhouse and home state of his main rival, as a tense wait for the full results continued two days after voters went to the polls. Obi, of the Labour party, beat ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu, a former Lagos governor who made the state the cornerstone of his presidential campaign. Tinubu won in two other south-western states, although votes are still being counted across Africa’s biggest democracy, with some yet to even cast their ballots, prompting sharp criticism of the country’s electoral commission. As of Monday afternoon, just three of Nigeria’s 36 states had declared their results. The weekend’s poll was blighted by delays and violence in Lagos. Armed men fired gunshots at one polling station in the Surulere district, sending people scampering for safety. The attackers made off with the presidential ballot box. Other polling stations in Surulere and the upmarket Lekki district also suffered violence, with some voters reporting that they were being intimidated to vote for a certain party. Nigeria’s electoral commission was forced to apologise for delays that have slowed the collection and announcement of the results for what is seen as the most closely fought election in the country’s democratic era. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) acknowledged that its online portal for viewing results had been “slow and unsteady”, as it complained about the difficulties in scaling up the system trialled in last year’s state election.
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https://www.ft.com/content/0042ba7e-be34-4156-8d78-91fb461aaf6f
Under Nigeria’s new electoral system designed to bring more transparency into a usually opaque process, election results are meant to be uploaded directly from the almost 177,000 polling stations across Nigeria immediately after voting concludes and results are collated at that station. Yet more than 24 hours after polls closed, less than a third of those results had been uploaded, leading to allegations of political chicanery by the three leading parties in the presidential race.