The Nigerian president-elect, Bola Tinubu, will take office on schedule on 29 May despite court challenges to the election result, the country’s information minister has said.
On a visit to the UK to counter claims that the 25 February election in Africa’s most populous country had been fixed, Lai Mohammed said there was “no basis” for an interim government to be formed until the court challenges could be resolved.
Mohammed – like Tinubu a member of the ruling All Progressives Congress party (APC) – also claimed supporters of the defeated Labour presidential candidate Peter Obi were undermining democracy through their calls for the election to be rerun.
Tinubu was declared the winner of the election on an overall turn-out of 29%, the lowest in Nigeria’s democratic history. The result is being challenged in court by Obi – who came third – and by the second-placed opposition People’s Democratic party (PDP) led by Atiku Abubakar.
But the APC is asking the courts to strike down the Obi challenge on a series of technicalities.
This week the acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote an open letter to Joe Biden urging him to rethink his decision to endorse the results. The author of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah claimed the poll had been imperilled by “deliberate manipulation” and the “electoral commission ignored so many glaring red flags in its rush to announce a winner”.
The Obi petition to the election tribunal has to be settled within 180 days of being filed in March and after that there can be further appeals to higher courts.
Mohammed said the opposition “have a right to challenge the results in court but they do not have a right to call for insurrection. They do not have a right to say because they have lost, and the other candidate is sworn in, that will be the end of democracy. You do not go to court, and at the same time try to intimidate the judiciary. They are unpatriotic because they are calling for insurrection”.
Referring to Obi’s running mate, Yusuf Baba-Ahmed, he said: “If the running mate of a presidential candidate says if you swear in a validly elected candidate as president that would be the end of democracy, that is treason pure and simple. As a lawyer I know it is a treasonable felony to call for the end of democracy.”
He said Obi had never disowned these remarks, even though they threatened the stability of the country. “Democracy surviving in Nigeria is very important for democracy in Africa,” he added.
The information minister denied that low turnout and controversy over the result would weaken the new president’s legitimacy as he prepares to push through difficult economic reforms, including potentially reducing petrol subsidies.
But the minister’s visit to London suggests the incoming government is at least aware that it needs to fend off the potential damage to its reputation, and the perception in some capitals that it will not have the legitimacy to push through a reform programme.
Legal challenges to election results are relatively common in Nigeria but Obi’s insurgent campaign, resonant with young Nigerian voters, claims the election commission failed to upload the results in real time as promised. They say this delay in publishing the results may have allowed the ruling party to collude with electoral commission officials to manipulate results.
Mohammed insisted “a technical glitch” meant the presidential results could not be viewed on the portal, unlike the results for other elections being held on the same day. He said “INEC suspected a cyber-attack and in order to protect the integrity of the data decided to float another portal, and that portal did not start working until much later in the day”. But he added that election agents for every participating political party in 186,000 polling units had signed off forms endorsing the tabulated results. “No one has come forward to say there is a discrepancy on what is shown on these forms and what is on INEC portal,” he said.
Overall, he said, the elections “were the most transparent and authentic in the country’s history. They were free and fair”, insisting that the outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari, “was ready to lose this election rather than win at all costs”.
The official results showed Tinubu secured 8.79m votes, while Abubakar won 6.9m votes and Obi scored 6.1m. Neither Obi or the other challenger were close to meeting Nigeria’s other constitutional requirement of winning at least 25% of the votes in at least 25 states in the country’s federation. Tinubu passed that threshold in 29 states.
