IN SHORT: Nigeria’s presidential election was a close race, but claims on social media that the wrong candidate was declared president-elect are not supported by evidence.
Reactions about the conduct and outcome of Nigeria's election have been mixed, days after the electoral body declared Bola Tinubu of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) president-elect.
The Independent National Electoral Commission or Inec is the electoral body responsible for conducting elections in Nigeria.
But a post shared on Facebook claims that the election result displayed on the “IReV Portal” shows Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate, as the winner of the 25 February presidential election, contradicting Inec's declaration.
The Inec Result Viewing Portal (Irev) is a platform created by the electoral body for the transparent transmission of election results.
The post reads: “BREAKING NEWS: Results Obtained from IReV Portal shows that Peter Obi is the winner of the 2023 presidential election.”
It goes on to list the result it claimed to have obtained from Inec's website: "LP: 19 states + FCT, PDP: 8 states, APC: 7 states, NNPP: 2 states."
Nigeria's presidential election was held on 25 February and governors' elections earlier scheduled for 11 March will now be held on 18 March.
However, some of the aggrieved parties have turned to various courts in the country to challenge the outcome of the presidential election.
The same claim about Obi appeared on Facebook here and here.
But is it true? We checked.
Uploading of election results ongoing
The chair of Inec, Mahmood Yakubu, declared Tinubu the winner of the February presidential election, having won 25% of the total votes cast across the country.
However, not all results from the 17,6846 polling units had been uploaded on the Irev portal, at the time of writing. Only results from 164,505 polling stations had been uploaded.
The portal does not show Obi as the winner of the election. The uploading of the results on the portal, which the claim said showed Obi as the winner, is still ongoing.
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