Nigeria's president-elect says vote integrity

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Nigeria's president-elect says vote integrity

Nigeria's president-elect Bola Tinubu 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 received 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 win the Nigerian election by getting more votes than their rivals if they get at least two-thirds of the vote in at least two-thirds of the 36 states and the federal capital Abuja, which Tinubu did.

I am very happy I have been elected the president of the federal republic of Nigeria, Tinubu said to cheers in Abuja. I accept it. Nigeria's election was intended to be its fairest and most open contest to date. The electoral process encountered problems owing to new technology that did not function well and seemed to overwhelm Nigeria's notoriously inadequate communications network.

INEC had promised to upload results from every polling unit to its website in real time, but most units were unable to do so immediately, causing a lack of trust in the process. Thousands of results are still to be uploaded.

The main opposition parties of Atiku and Obi have rejected the results as fraudulent because of these failings.

I applaud INEC for running a credible election, no matter what anyone says, said Tinubu. The lapses reported were relatively few in number and were unaffected by the final outcome of the election. Tinubu is currently facing a long list of national problems, including Islamist insurgencies in the northeast, armed attacks, killings and kidnappings, conflict between cattle herders and farmers, cash, fuel and power shortages, and deeply entrenched corruption.