A constitutional lawyer and human rights activist, Mike Ozekhome SAN has faulted the recently concluded presidential election which produced the candidate of the All Progressive Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the winner of the election.
Sharing his take about the outcome of the election with reporters, Ozekhome said,
“my take is that the just concluded election was poorly done, poorly handled, obviously manipulated, obviously compromised, there is no question about that.
The Electoral Act of 2022 makes it clear in several sections that you must upload results from the polling units. And there are about 127,974 polling units in Nigeria. The constitutional requirements is that you must upload results from these polling units but what we saw was INEC resulting to manual, mutilating results, shutting down their portal for over 24 hours during which time all the doctoring and surgical operations had taken place.
The election was therefore not fair, it was not transparent, it was not genuine, it was not credible. And so the emergent president elect is going to carry a very strong heavy burden of legitimacy and lack of it on his neck like an albatross.
It doesn’t require even protest or demonstrations on the streets to drive home these points. The issue is a moral burden on him.”