Results start trickling in amid delays in Nigeria

Nigeria's election commission published results for just one of 36 states on Sunday evening, as the country's delayed election to pick a new president started drawing to a close. 

Results from 35 other states and Abuja were still pending. This followed logistical problems and security concerns that caused voting delays. Although voting was scheduled to conclude on Saturday, people across much of the country continued casting ballots on Sunday in the general election, which also included choosing a new national legislature. 

"We are aware there will be many more states concluding tonight and [tallies] coming to Abuja," Mahmood Yakubu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), said in the capital. Yakubu then adjourned the session and said further results would follow starting at 11 a.m. local time (1000 GMT/UTC) on Monday. 

Bola Tinubu well ahead in small state of Ekiti

In the western state of Ekiti, one of the smallest and least populous in the country, the three suspected front-runners nationwide were leading the race. Incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari is leaving office after serving the maximum permitted two terms. 

The candidate for Buhari's All Progressives Congress party is 70-year-old Bola Tinubu. He led the way comfortably in Ekiti with 201,494 votes, according to the commission. 

Atiku Abubakar, 76, represents Nigeria's other traditional powerhouse the People's Democratic Party; he had secured 89,554 votes in Ekiti. Tinubu is a former governor of Lagos, Abubakar a former vice president.And the surprise third horse in the race, Peter Obi, of the Labour Party, who had gained traction particularly among the young, was a distant third on 11,397 votes. 

However, Ekiti state represents just a tiny fraction of the almost 90 million Nigerians eligible to vote across Africa's most populous country. Voting habits can also vary considerably by region in a country with a predominantly Christian south and Muslim north.

Questions, concerns on delays for INEC

Abubakar urged the INEC to upload the results immediately after saying some state governors would try to compromise the results. "It will be a disservice to Nigerians and a negation to democracy for anyone to subvert the will of the people as freely expressed in their votes yesterday," he said in a statement. 

Abubakar claimed massive fraud in 2019 following his defeat to Buhari. An observers group, Yiaga Africa, also questioned the delays and urged the INEC to come forward with more details on the reasons. 

"We observed several levels of irregularities which we honestly as an organization can no longer excuse," Yiaga co-founder Cynthia Mbamalu said at a press conference. "As a civil society group who invested a lot to build confidence in the process, build confidence in INEC, we also have the responsibility to hold the electoral commission to account for the irregularities that we have observed." 

INEC meanwhile said the problems with uploading results on its IReV data page were the result of "technical hitches" and that there was no risk of tampering. 

"The commission wishes to assure Nigerians that the challenges are not due to any intrusion or sabotage of our systems," it said in a statement. "It is important to avoid statements and actions that can heat up the polity at this time."(AFP, AP, Reuters)