The New Nigeria Peoples Party has called for the cancellation of the result of the 2023 presidential election held on Saturday, February 25.
The party made the call on Wednesday at a press conference in Abuja, according to a report.
The chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, had on Wednesday declared the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Tinubu, as the winner of the 25 February election.
According to the result announced, Tinubu polled 8,794,726 to defeat his closest rivals Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, who polled 6, 984, 520 votes, and Peter Obi of Labour Party, who secured 6,101,533 votes.
Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP came a distant fourth with 1,496,687 votes.
Speaking at the press conference, the national chairman of the NNPP, Rufai Alkali, said with the way it conducted the election, INEC had taken the country back to the pre-2015 era.
“We are deeply concerned that going by what had happened on election day, the election umpire has taken our country back to the pre-2015 era of election where everything goes: where voters were deliberately and systematically disenfranchised; where ballot box snatching and ballot box stuffing was the norm; where voter suppression was widespread; where violence and vote-buying were the main deciding factors of the outcome of elections; where security agents openly take side with the ruling party and participate actively in rigging elections..,” he said.
Alkali said his party observed: that INEC deliberately undermined the NNPP in the process, allowed campaign on election day by the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) and others; voter suppression, vote-buying, BVAS failure and over-voting, lying about IReV sever and election marred by unprecedented violence.
He, on behalf of the NNPP, therefore, demanded the cancellation of the poll.
He said, “To save our democracy and our country, the present election results must not be accepted by Nigerians and by all friends of Nigeria. We are therefore calling on the immediate suspension of the announcement of results and the cancellation of the 2023 presidential election across the country. New election should be conducted as soon as possible.”
