Although Bola Ahmed Tinubu scored only one per cent of votes in the South East, as Nigeria’s next president, he has a responsibility to bring peace to the region by intentionally running an inclusive government and addressing the marginalization of the South East.
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In the early hours of 01 March 2023, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, declared Mr. Bola Ahmed Tinubu the winner of the 2023 presidential election. In a tightly contested poll, according to INEC, Tinubu garnered a total of 8,794,726 votes as against his closest rivals, Atiku Abubakar, who polled 6,984,520, and Peter Obi, who received a total of 6,101,533 votes. The three leading candidates won an equivalent of twelve states, each spreading across different geo-political zones in the country.
Although the results and processes of the elections have been challenged at the electoral tribunal by both Atiku (as he’s more commonly known) and Obi, INEC issuing a certificate of return to Mr. Tinubu implies that he is most likely to be sworn in as the next president of Nigeria by 29 May 2023. But as I predicted in an earlier essay, voting patterns were partly influenced by identity and value considerations, raising serious gaps in the spread with concomitant legitimacy concerns...
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