The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced the results of the 2023 presidential election conducted in Abuja on Saturday.

Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) took 281,987, which is 62 percent of the total votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory. This result left Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) with 90,902, which is 20 percent of the votes; and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) with 73,743, which is 16 percent.

Following the announcement, some Nigerians argued that the APC and PDP candidates could no longer win the presidential election for failing to get 25 percent of the total votes cast in Abuja. FIJ asked lawyers to clarify the position of the constitution on this.

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Ridwan Oke, the legal services director of Connect Hub Nigeria, gave FIJ an interpretation of Section 134 of the 1999 Constitution.

“We have 36 states of the federation and two-thirds of that is about 25. So, if you are a presidential candidate, you must have 25 percent of the total votes cast in at least 25 states of the federation before you are declared [winner]. If nobody has that, if the candidate with the highest number of votes still fails to have the required 25 percent, there will be a rerun election,” Oke told FIJ on Friday.

“When it goes to the rerun, it will only be the majority [votes required]. So, if you are polling 10 million votes, you must have at least 25 percent of the total votes in 25 states in that majority vote. The candidate does not have to win all those 25 states. They only need to meet the minimum 25 percent in the states.”

Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, had, in a message read on live television today, given his position on the controversy. According to him, whoever fails to get 25% minimum votes in the FCT can’t be declared president.

Agbakoba wrote that the matter was “so clear” and to him “so trite” he could not understand what the confusion was. He said that he had already written a letter to INEC.

Agbakoba was the president of the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) between 2006 and 2008.

O. O. Nwanni, a legal practitioner, told FIJ that the constitutional prescription was not as ambiguous as it seemed.

Nwanni highlighted the use of the conjunction ‘and’ in the sentence and stated that the FCT was not a state. He said that the constitution gave the FCT a special status as Nigeria’s administrative seat.

“My own understanding of the constitutional requirement of section 134, it says: A candidate for an election to the office of the president shall be deemed to have been duly elected where, there being more than two candidates for the election, he has the highest number of votes cast at the election and he has not less than one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least two-thirds of all the states in the federation and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

“FCT is different. You must make that requirement in the states and in the FCT. If you don’t meet that requirement in Abuja, you do not meet the constitutional requirement.

“What they taught us in elementary drafting in the university: the draftsman, when drafting the section, wrote ‘AND Federal Capital Territory’. That conjunction tells you that they are coming together. This negates any interpretation that may delude the masses. There are even opinions that the FCT is a state, which isn’t so.

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“The coordinating conjunction grammatically implies that the 36 states and the FCT be taken as separate collective entities.”

On February 24, Mike Igini, a former resident electoral officer, echoed Nwanni’s interpretation in a television interview.

Members of the ruling APC Presidential Campaign Committee (APC-PVC), however, disputed Nwani’s interpretation in a press conference on Wednesday.

The APC-PCC claimed that its candidate would be declared winner despite falling short of the required 25% of votes cast in Abuja.

Since Abuja attained the federal capital status, no presidential candidate has become president without meeting the 25% required votes cast.

The controversial Section 134 of the Constitution states that a candidate will be declared winner of a presidential election if “(a) he has the majority of votes cast at the election; and (b) he has not less than one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least two-thirds of all the States in the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja”.