Nigeria's president-elect Bola Tinubu on Wednesday defended the integrity of the national election he won, and called for citizens to unite around him after a bitter dispute over the results that opposition parties have said are flawed.
The Independent National Electoral Commission INEC said Tinubu garnered 8.79 million votes in the weekend election, ahead of main opposition challenger Atiku Abubakar's 6.98 million votes.
Peter Obi, an outsider popular with younger and more educated urban voters, garnered 6.1 million votes.
A candidate can get more votes in a Nigerian election by getting more votes than their rivals if they get 25% of the vote in at least two-thirds of the 36 states and the federal capital Abuja, which Tinubu did.
Tinubu said he was very happy to be elected the president of the federal republic of Nigeria. I accept it. Nigeria's election was meant to be its fairest and most open contest to date. The electoral process encountered problems, due to new technology that did not function well and seemed to overwhelm Nigeria's notoriously inadequate communications network.
INEC had promised to upload results to its website in real time, but most units were unable to do so immediately, undermining trust in the process. Thousands of results are still to be uploaded.
The main opposition parties of Atiku and Obi rejected the results as fraudulent because of these failings.
I think the INEC will run a credible election no matter what anyone says, according to Tinubu. The lapses reported were relatively few in number and were unaffected by the final outcome of the election. Tinubu has a long list of national problems, including Islamist insurgencies in the northeast, armed attacks, killings and kidnappings, conflict between livestock herders and farmers, cash, fuel and power shortages, and deeply entrenched corruption.