Only eight per cent of voters rated the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections as poor, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) has said.
NBA National Publicity Secretary Akorede Lawal said in a statement on Tuesday night that this was part of the findings contained in the interim report of the NBA Election Working Group.
The interim report was based on the reports sent to the NBA 2023 Elections Situation Room by the NBA Election Observers from the 36 states of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
NBA President Yakubu Maikyau, on January 12, constituted the NBA Election Working Group, chaired by Mrs. Linda Rose Bala, the association’s First Vice President, with the mandate to constitute the NBA Observation Team and liaise with the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) for members of the team to be accredited to observe this year’s general election.
Lawal said, generally, findings from the observation process “indicated that only a quarter of the electorate were excellently impressed by the conduct of the ballots (27.1 per cent) while the majority of the voters (64.6 per cent) were somewhat satisfied, only 8.2 per cent rated the election poor or very poor”.
The report is in sync with comments by Maikyau on Channels TV last Saturday that despite challenges, INEC performed well in the delivery of the elections.
“There were challenges, definitely. There were some infractions; some of them actually constituted electoral offences. But on the whole, I will score INEC as having performed maybe about 78, 80 per cent in the delivery of these elections,” Maikyau said.
But the NBA president had received some criticisms from some lawyers, who scored the electoral umpire below par, just as some political parties, as has become the tradition since 1999, have challenged the election results.
All Progressives Congress (APC) standard bearer, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, was declared the winner of the presidential election and President-elect with 8,794,726 votes ahead of Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) by the INEC.