The Executive Director of foremost election observer, Yiaga Africa, Mr Samson Itodo has said that about 200 million ballot papers were wasted in the just concluded presidential and National Assembly elections because a lot of people did not show up to cast their votes.
Itodo said on Channels Television’s The 2023 Verdict on Wednesday: “If 72 million ballot papers were issued to these accredited voters. We have about 200 million sheet of papers that have gone to waste. And if you check how much was expended per voter in this election, it was somewhere around six to eight dollars per voter.
“If you multiply that you discover that we have wasted billions of naira because people didn’t show up to cast their votes. And so that is money that could have been used to provide drugs to our primary healthcare centres”.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) conducted presidential and National Assembly elections across the country on Saturday.
The number of registered voters was 93,469,008. The total of collected permanent voter cards was 87.2 million against 176,606 polling units. However, according to INEC, 25,286,616 voters were accredited.
At the end of the polls on Saturday, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was declared winner of the presidential election by the Chairman of INEC, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu on Wednesday.
According to INEC, Tinubu was victorious in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states, and secured significant numbers in several other states to claim the highest number of votes — 8,794,726, almost two million votes more than his closest rival, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Contesting for the sixth time, Atiku got 6,984,520 votes, while the candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, finished the race with 6,101,533.
Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State, received his certificate of return from INEC on Wednesday afternoon, alongside his running mate Senator Kashim Shettima.
PEO
2 March 2023 at 3:34 pm
Please do not deceived yourself, majority of Nigerians are not happy with you. About 95% are bitter, and under this condition, things will not go down well with you except our Almighty God does not exist.
As far as God Almighty exist, i don’t see you spending up to 6 months in office. For solution come and see me. Seek for solutions before swearing in. It will be bittered. You will regret being a President.