The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), Omoyele Sowore, has rejected the result of the 2023 presidential election which produced Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as president-elect.
Tinubu secured 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) who finished second with 6,984,520 votes and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) who finished third with 6,101,533 votes.
Sowore was one of the 18 candidates on the ballot, but he ended up in 16th place with only 14,608 votes, less than half of the 33,953 votes he scored when he contested in 2019, an election President Muhammadu Buhari won.
In an address he posted on his Twitter account on Thursday, March 2, 2023, Sowore said the election is illegitimate because it didn’t meet any legal requirements.
The media publisher noted that Nigerians ignored his pre-election warnings about how unprepared the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was before February 25.
He said, “There was nothing surprising about it. We shouted ourselves hoarse that these criminals in our system have no interest in organising free and fair elections. What they did is a selection as they usually do. They have just given you the candidate of the choice of the criminal political elites in Nigeria.”
He didn’t mention that he’ll challenge the result of the election in court, but Sowore disputed the number of votes he scored.
“Any figures, either for me or against me, or for them or against them, that you saw in this election were concocted and manufactured fraudulently, so don’t fall for the gimmicks of the ruling class,” he noted.
The candidate said Nigerians must understand that elections alone won’t give them the country they want and they must work together for a revolution. He made a similar call when he lost in 2019