A civil society organisation, the Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth and Advancement, YIAGA, on Wednesday validated the declaration of President Muhammadu Buhari as the winner of the presidential election last Saturday.
The NGO said the results announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, were consistent with the findings of its observers as part of its Watching the Vote (WTV), project.
YIAGA Africa has as its technical partners, the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and the US-based National Democratic Institute.
It deployed the Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT), described a gold standard citizen observation methodology that employs statistics and information communication technologies.
Its estimates were based on observations from 3,030 observers deployed in pairs to a random statistical sample of 1,515 polling units.
YIAGA Africa said INEC’S official results fell within its estimated ranges.
It, therefore, urged the public, political parties, and candidates to have confidence in the ballots cast at the polling units.
The group said in its post-election statement: “Based on reports from 1,491 or 98.4 per cent of sampled polling units, YIAGA Africa’s findings show that for the presidential election, the All Progressives Congress, APC, should receive between 50.0 per cent and 55.8 per cent of the vote; and the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, should receive between 41.2 per cent and 47.0 per cent of the vote.
“These figures are consistent with the official results as announced by INEC. For both APC and PDP, the official results fall within the PVT estimated ranges.”
YIAGA Africa’s WTV Chairman, Dr. Hussaini Abdu, added: “YIAGA Africa urges Nigerian voters, political parties, candidates, and international stakeholders to have confidence in the just-concluded electoral process and the officially announced results.”
The Civil Society Group called on INEC to provide clarity around two issues which it said were of pressing concern to Nigerians, although, they did not affect the overall outcome of the elections.
“First, the overall, percentage of cancelled ballots announced by INEC was 3.3 per cent of all registered voter. This figure was four times higher than the rate from 2015 when registered voters in cancelled polling units were less than 1 per cent of all registered voters.
“Second, YIAGA Africa noted discrepancies between the number of registered voters announced prior to the election and the numbers announced during collation and called on INEC to provide an in-depth explanation, including of whether these differences indicated that collation did not conclude in all parts of the country.
“However, YIAGA Africa noted that the PVT data, which projected its estimated vote shares on the basis of the numbers announced at the polling units before any cancelation of results could take place, showed that neither of these issues impacted the outcome of the election.”
Trump says he walked from Deal with Kim over sanction demands
President Donald Trump of the United States, U.S., said on Thursday he had walked away from a nuclear deal at his summit with Kim Jong Un because of unacceptable demands from the North Korean leader to lift punishing U.S.-led sanctions.
Trump said two days of talks in the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, had made good progress in building relations and on the key issue of denuclearization, but it was important not to rush into a bad deal.
“It was all about the sanctions,” Trump said at a news conference after the talks were cut short; adding, “Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that.”
The United Nations and the United States ratcheted up sanctions on North Korea when the reclusive state undertook a series of nuclear and ballistic missile tests in 2017, cutting off its main sources hard cash.
Both Trump and Kim left the venue of their talks, the French-colonial-era Metropole hotel, without attending a planned lunch together.
“Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times,” Trump said, adding “it was a friendly walk”.
Failure to reach an agreement marks a setback for Trump, a self-styled dealmaker under pressure at home over his ties to Russia and testimony from Michael Cohen, his former personal lawyer who accused him of breaking the law while in office.
Trump said Cohen “lied a lot” during Congressional testimony in Washington on Wednesday, though he had told the truth when he said there had been “no collusion” with Russia.
The collapse of the talks will also raise questions about the Trump administration’s preparations and about what some critics see as his cavalier style of diplomacy on the fly.
Since their first summit in Singapore in June, Trump has stressed the good chemistry he has with Kim, but there have been questions about whether the bonhomie could move them beyond summit pageantry to substantive progress on eliminating a North Korean nuclear arsenal that threatens the United States.
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