Nigeria: supreme court dismisses opposition’s appeal, upholds Tinubu’s presidential victory

Nigeria’s Supreme Court Thursday (26 October) confirmed President Bola Tinubu as the winner of February’s presidential election, rejecting an opposition’s appeal that challenged a prior verdict — and ending months of legal battles over the presidential race.
The seven-member court dismissed the opposition’s appeal that cited flaws in the voting system, fraud and electoral law breaches, and Tinubu’s lacked qualifications, saying that the challenges were “devoid of merits.” The ruling follows a decision in which two other candidates — Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party — saw their petitions rejected by an appeals court in September, clearing the way for Tinubu’s presidency. Abubakar and Obi who came in second and third, respectively, stated that the electoral commission failed to electronically transmit results from polling stations to an online portal.
The court’s decision, which is final, gives the 71-year-old Tinubu a firm mandate to lead. The former governor of the capital, Lagos, was elected president in February in the closest race in Nigeria’s modern history, winning 37% of the vote while Abubakar and Obi received 29% and 25% of the vote respectively. In response to the legal challenges to the result, the election commission acknowledged “glitches” in the voting system, but denied that the election’s integrity had been compromised. Most elections in Nigeria have sparked legal disputes since the country established democratic rule in 1999, but the country’s Supreme Court has never upended a presidential result.