On Sunday, a day after an extremely close election between the three front-runners for the presidency of Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria, ballots were being counted.
There were nearly 90 million eligible voters in Saturday’s election, which was largely calm but necessitated many voters staying out until after dark due to isolated incidents of violence, delays, and technical difficulties.
Many Nigerians are hopeful that a new president will be able to better address the pervasive insecurity, unemployment, and increasing poverty plaguing their country after two terms under President Muhammadu Buhari.
Bola Tinubu, a 70-year-old former governor of Lagos and candidate for the APC, is running against Atiku Abubakar, a 76-year-old former vice president and candidate for the PDP, who is making his sixth run for the presidency of the country.
But Labour’s Peter Obi has taken on the APC and PDP’s hegemony with a change-focused campaign, challenging it for the first time since the end of military control in 1999.
On Saturday night, throngs of people gathered outside polling places in Lagos and other cities as election officials read out the preliminary results and manually tallied the first results before entering them into a central database.
“We just finished counting, but we need to make sure they upload the results,” said Chizoba Onuoha, an IT manager, watching the count at her Lagos polling station.
