According to SaharaReporters, we are confidently projecting Muhammadu
Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the
winner of last weekend’s presidential election based on
collated poll results from 95 percent of Nigeria’s polling units.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will
resume the official release of the poll figures at 10 a.m.
Nigerian time today, with Mr. Buhari all but certain to be
declared the president-elect.
Last night, INEC suspended the official release of the state-
by-state vote counts for the keenly contested presidential
election. However, with only five percent of votes remaining to
be added up, our figures indicate that Mr. Buhari is leading
incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan by more than two
million votes. In addition, the APC candidate has secured at
least twenty-five percent of votes cast in two-thirds of
Nigeria’s 36 states. Mr. Buhari has so far won 14,855,820
million votes, with Mr. Jonathan trailing him with 12,107,628
million.
Our analysis, based on collated votes that were already
announced in different states, shows that there is no
statistical pathway open to Mr. Jonathan to surmount his
vote deficit with very few polling units left to account for.
INEC’s formal declaration of Mr. Buhari as the winner of the
presidential election will represent a historic moment in
Nigeria’s history, being the first time that an opposition
candidate would unseat an incumbent head of government at
the federal level. Another historic aspect is the fact that Mr.
Buhari finally triumphed on his fifth run as a presidential
candidate of one of Nigeria’s parties.
