Protesters storm High Commission in London over Nigeria’s election  

Some Nigerians staged a massive protest at the country’s High Commission in London, United Kingdom (UK) on Thursday, demanding the nullification of Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the February 25 presidential elections.

The demonstrators held placards that displayed messages like “Rishi Sunak (the UK Prime Minister), it is too soon to congratulate Nigeria”, “Mahmood Yakubu (the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC), you are not good”, and “All we are saying, give us free polls”.

According to reports, the supporters of the two major opposition party candidates, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, constituted the protesters.

According to them, last month’s elections were “blatantly rigged”.

Recall that Prof. Yakubu, on March 1 announced Tinubu, winner of the election with a total of 8,794,726 votes, having also scored over 25 percent of the votes cast in 30 states.

Atiku, a former vice-president, came second with 6,984,520 votes, while Obi polled a total of 6,101,533 votes to emerge third place.

Addressing an international press conference on March 2, Obi had vowed to challenge the electoral process in court, insisting his party won the election but had been robbed of its mandate.

“We will explore all legal and peaceful options to reclaim our mandate. We won the election and we will prove it to Nigerians,” he said.

Atiku made a similar claim and vow.

A coalition of International Election Observation Missions also faulted the process saying that the introduction of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV) were perceived as an important step to ensure the integrity and credibility of the elections, but noted that uploading of results using the BVAS did not work as expected.