President Muhammadu Buhari of All Progressives Congress, APC, has been re-elected as Nigeria’s president for another four-year term after facing down stiff competition from his closest challenger Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.
Buhari was declared the winner of the election in Wednesday morning, more than three days after voting closed in most of the polling centres.
Abubakar, a former ally of President Buhari, led a motley pack of challengers, most of whom posed no serious obstacle to Buhari’s re-election.
In the final tally announced by Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, Buhari, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, polled 15,191,847 votes while Abubakar, a former Nigerian vice president from 1999 to 2007, got 11,262,978 votes.
The bulk of Buhari’s numbers came from the North where he has a cult following.
Both Buhari and Atiku are from the Northern part of Nigeria and are northern Muslims.
But Buhari’s popularity in Kano, his native Katsina, insurgency-ravaged Yobe and Borno states, and Zamfara was too much for PDP’s Atiku to contend with.
The president also won in four out of six states in South West, a traditional stronghold of the APC, and four states in the country’s North-Central which many believed will swing towards the opposition. (The Guardian)
