On 26 February 2023, the Independent National Electoral Commision (INEC) started collating the 2023 Nigeria presidential election result, and this commenced around 6:50pm GMT at Abuja, the countries capital.
The Chairman of the Commision, Mahmood Yakubu, announced that after collating the election result at State level, the State Collation Officer for the Presidential Election (SCOPE) shall be accompanied to Abuja by the Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) and security agencies.
The SCOPE, shall then announce the votes obtained by each political party in the State, including notices of cancellations and polling units where elections did not hold (if applicable).
The REC and SCOPE for Ekiti State arrived shortly after 6:00pm GMT on the 26 February 2023 and the presidential result for Ekiti is as follows:
This was the only available result at the time, and the INEC chairman adjourned the collation to 11:00am GMT on 27 February 2023. As expected, there was an uproar of disagreement from political party agents who were observing the collation, but the issues raised were ignored by the chairman of the Commision.
On 27 February 2023, the collation continued around 11:30am GMT, and below are the additional states that have submitted their results to INEC at the collation center, in addition to Ekiti state above.
Dino Melaye, a Nigerian politician and former senator, was present at the collation center as a PDP political party agent, he raised the issue of transparency and result verification, by asking the chairman of the Commission to project the uploaded presidential election result to the screens at the collation center, so they can be cross checked against the figures that were being presented by the various REC’s and SCOPE’s. This request was ignored by the chairman of the Commission, which begs to question the credibility of the election results.
Mahmood Yakubu, the Chairman of the Commision, further adjourned the collation of the presidential election result for an hour since there wasn’t any more states available to present their result.
At the moment, the APC is in the lead for the presidential seat.
