This is coming as the election was widely allegedly acclaimed to be poorly conducted and rigged in favour of the ruling All Progressives Congress.
World leaders including the United States President, Joe Biden, have not yet put a call across to President-elect, Bola Tinubu, who was declared of Nigeria’s February 25 presidential election.
This is coming as the election was widely allegedly acclaimed to be poorly conducted and rigged in favour of the ruling All Progressives Congress.
Unlike Buhari, who was declared the winner of the election in April 2015, Tinubu has yet to receive an official congratulation from world leaders, including the US President, weeks after being declared the winner.
On April 1, 2015, then-French President François Hollande, then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and then-US President Barack Obama were among the dignitaries who congratulated Buhari.
Hollande also expressed gratitude for the Nigerian people’s dedication and the professionalism displayed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in conducting the elections.
Ban Ki-Moon congratulated Buhari on his hard-won victory and praised INEC for organizing the elections in a professional and credible “manner under challenging circumstances” in a statement issued on Tuesday, March 31, 2015.
“The INEC, domestic and foreign observers, civil society, political parties, and, most importantly, the Nigerian people themselves. They have demonstrated how a democracy can function; I warmly congratulate Gen. Buhari as the successful Presidential candidate for the All Progressives Congress (APC),” said Federica Mogherini, then High Representative/Vice-President of the European Union (EU).
However, notable world leaders have remained silent for days, if not weeks, in response to several domestic calls to re-examine the process and court cases.
According to SaharaReporters, while the US government sent Tinubu a message of congratulations days after the INEC announcement, some civic groups chastised the US government, saying it “hurriedly congratulated Tinubu despite his fraudulent victory because the US plans to use him as a stooge for the next four years.”
Chatham House, an independent policy institute based in London, said in an analysis by one of its fellows on March 8 that the February 25 presidential election demonstrated that the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC failed to learn new lessons.
The London-based institute had stressed that the electoral umpire failed to adhere to its own guidelines, which it enunciated before the poll, especially the one bordering on the uploading of results in real-time.
“The INEC’s performance and controversies over these results mean that the electoral reforms and lessons declared to have been learned were not fully applied and, as an electoral body, it was significantly less prepared than it claimed.
“Due to INEC’s logistical failures and widespread delayed opening of polling units, early voters were frustrated, and many voters and INEC staff were unable to locate their polling units for several hours,” Chatham House stated.
Chatham House added that the commission’s patchy deployment of technology in the use of a Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) is still being closely scrutinized and criticized.
