By Fatima Zahra Muhammad
The Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the just concluded Feb. 25th presidential election in Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar on Monday led supporters on a protest to the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Abuja.
Recall that INEC declared the flagbearer of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Bola Tinubu, the winner of the February 25 election with 8,794,726 votes.
Tinubu beat Atiku who polled 6,984,520 votes and the Labour Party, LP, candidate Peter Obi who secured 6,101,533 votes.
But while speaking at a press conference on March 3rd, Atiku rejected the outcome of the elections, saying the elections were neither free nor fair.
“The weekend election was neither free nor fair. Preliminary assessments indicate that it is the worst conducted elections since the return to democratic rule.
“The manipulation and fraud that attended this election was unprecedented in the history of our nation. I can still not understand why the electoral umpire was in such a hurry to conclude collation and announcement of the result, given the number of complaints of irregularities of bypassing of the BVAS, failure of uploading to the IREV, and unprecedented cancellations and disenfranchisement of millions of voters in breach of the Electoral Act and the commission’s own guidelines. It was indeed a rape of democracy, ” he told journalists.
The outing had in attendance the National Chairman of the PDP, Iyorchia Ayu, the former Sokoto state Governor, Aminu Waziri Tambuwal as well as a former senator, Dino Melaye.
