Lagos - Rotimi Amaechi, the governor of Rivers
state and director general of the All Progressives
Congress presidential campaign organisation
said that his party would be humble in victory.
He added that the APC would aim to identify and
find solutions to all the things the Peoples
Democratic Party failed to do.
Speaking to journalists at the national secretariat
of the APC in Abuja, he said that even though
they were excited by the victory, the task ahead
was more important.
He proudly confessed that he could now tell his
children that he was apart of an opposing party
removing the current administration, a first in the
history of Nigeria.
If Buhari wins and President Goodluck Jonathan
steps down, it would mark the first time in
Nigeria's history that an opposition party has
democratically taken control of the country from
the ruling party.
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detail
Results from 31 states and the small Federal
Capital Territory amounting to some 22 million
votes showed Buhari leading by nearly 3 million
votes. Buhari crucially carried Lagos state,
Nigeria's commercial hub with the largest number
of voters, according to results announced
Tuesday.
Electoral officials said they were awaiting results
from just five states to give a tally of Saturday's
election and expected to announce a final count
later in the day.
"As for the election, we have won it!" Garba
Shehu, Buhari's spokesman, said outside the
party's headquarters that has been decked out
with celebratory bunting for days.
But "We are not out of the woods yet, we don't
know what tricks the government is going to
play."
In the northern city of Kaduna, a spontaneous
celebration of Buhari's followers sprang up.
Young men on motor scooters performed wheelies
as hundreds of youths chanted: "Change!
Change! Change!" and cars honked their horns in
support. In Kaduna state, Buhari took 1.1 million
votes to Jonathan's 484,000.
Britain and the United States warned Monday of
the possibility of political meddling in the final
count. Jonathan's campaign spokesman Femi
Fani-Kayode said that was "absolute balderdash"
and demanded evidence.
Garba said the opposition party's agents at more
than 150,000 polling stations across the country
"tell us that we have won, but our victory is still
threatened." The winning candidate must take
more than half of all votes and at least 25
percent of votes in two-thirds of the 36 states
and the Federal Capital Territory at Abuja.
The austere and strict retired general, who says
he is a convert to democracy, has promised that
if he wins he will stamp out an insurgency in the
north waged by Boko Haram, a homegrown
Islamic extremist group that has killed thousands
of people, many of them civilians, has kidnapped
even young girls, and has pledged fealty to the
so-called Islamic State.
Critics and supporters agree that Buhari is the
one leader who did not treat the country's
treasury as a personal piggy bank. During his
brief 1984-1985 dictatorship he rule with an iron
fist, jailing people even for littering, and ordering
civil servants who arrived late to work to do
squats. He gagged the press and jailed
journalists to cover up a deepening economic
crisis as prices tumbled for the oil on which
Nigeria's economy depends. He eventually was
overthrown by his own soldiers.
Nigeria's 170 million people are divided almost
equally between Christians mainly in the south
and Muslims like Buhari who dominate the north.
Buhari for the first time won states in the
southwest and even took one third of votes in a
southeastern state an unprecedented
development that some say reflects more of an
anti-Jonathan than a pro-Buhari sentiment.
The vote counting in Abuja was disrupted
Tuesday by a representative of Jonathan's party
who protested that the proceedings were partial
to Buhari. "We have lost confidence in you. You
are tribalistic! You are partial!" shouted former
Cabinet minister Peter Godsday Orubebe to the
chairman of the electoral commission counting
the vote. The opposition has also complained
that electoral officials are partisan. The count is
being carried out in the presence of party
representatives, national and international
observers and media.
There have been delays in about a dozen states
sending results to the counting center because of
logistical challenges that had election material
being delivered by air, road, speedboat, mules
and camels, spokesman Kayode Idowu of the
Independent National Electoral Commission told
AP.
Buhari's showing in his fourth bid to become
president was boosted by the formation of a
coalition of major opposition parties two years
ago. Its choice of Buhari as a single candidate
presented the first real opportunity in the history
of Nigeria to oust a sitting president.
Buhari also was able to count on considerable
voter dissatisfaction with the performance of
Jonathan, who has been president since 2010.
"If indeed Buhari becomes president, it sends a
clear message to the people in government that
you cannot take the people of Nigeria for granted
and that Nigerian democracy is maturing," said
journalist and political analyst Kadaria Ahmed.
She said Jonathan's perceived insensitivity to the
suffering of citizens caught up in the mayhem of
Boko Haram's uprising where some 10,000
people were killed last year and more than 1.5
million people have been driven from their homes.
The Nigerian military, with help from regional
troops, forced Boko Haram out of areas the
insurgent had taken in recent months as they
formed their self-styled "caliphate."
Because of decades of military dictatorship, this
is only the eighth election since the country won
independence from Britain in 1960, and the fifth
since democracy was restored in 1999.

success is sweet.

sai Buhari.

Na your time joor.