The 2023 presidential election was the most competitive since the return to democracy. For the first time, four candidates won significant support and three of them won at least eleven states each. Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) won with 36.61% of the vote, the lowest winning share of any president since 1999. The election was also the first held under the Electoral Act 2022, with the BVAS machine used to accredit every voter.
The candidates
- Bola Tinubu (APC), governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007 and a key builder of the APC, ran on the slogan “Renewed Hope”. His Muslim–Muslim ticket with Kashim Shettima, former governor of Borno State, was controversial.
- Atiku Abubakar (PDP), vice-president from 1999 to 2007, was running for president for the sixth time. The PDP was weakened by a feud with five of its own governors, the “G5”, who refused to back him.
- Peter Obi (Labour Party), former governor of Anambra State, left the PDP months before the election and drew enthusiastic support from young urban voters and many in the South-East and Middle Belt. His supporters called themselves the “Obidients”.
- Rabiu Kwankwaso (NNPP), former governor of Kano State, dominated in Kano.
A cash crunch and fuel queues
The vote took place during an economic squeeze. The Central Bank’s redesign of the naira notes, introduced in late 2022 with a short deadline for swapping old notes, left banks and ATMs short of cash for weeks. Long queues for petrol added to the hardship. Some politicians argued the cash shortage was designed to curb vote buying.
BVAS and IReV
INEC used the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to verify voters by fingerprint or facial recognition, and promised that a photo of each polling unit result sheet (form EC8A) would be uploaded from the BVAS to its Result Viewing Portal (IReV) so that anyone could check the figures.
On election night, results for the National Assembly elections appeared on IReV, but results for the presidential election did not, for many hours. INEC blamed a technical glitch. Opposition parties and many observers said the delay undermined trust in the collation that followed, which went ahead at the National Collation Centre in Abuja.
The result
| Candidate | Party | Votes | Share | States won |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bola Tinubu | APC | 8,794,726 | 36.61% | 12 |
| Atiku Abubakar | PDP | 6,984,520 | 29.07% | 12 |
| Peter Obi | LP | 6,101,533 | 25.40% | 11 + FCT |
| Rabiu Kwankwaso | NNPP | 1,496,687 | 6.40% | 1 |
INEC declared Tinubu the winner on 1 March 2023. Of 93.5 million registered voters, only 26.7% voted, the lowest turnout of any presidential election since 1999. Obi won Lagos State, Tinubu’s political base, by a narrow margin, one of the biggest upsets of the election.
Violence and voter intimidation
Most of the country voted peacefully, but observers recorded violence and intimidation in several states. In parts of Lagos, groups of thugs disrupted voting, attacked voters and destroyed ballot papers in areas seen as opposition strongholds. There were also attacks in Rivers, Kogi, Kano and elsewhere. These problems were worse at the governorship elections on 18 March.
In court
Atiku and Obi both went to the Presidential Election Petition Court. They argued that INEC’s failure to upload results in real time breached the law, that Tinubu had not won 25% of the vote in the Federal Capital Territory, and that he had not been qualified to run.
On 6 September 2023, the court dismissed both petitions. It held that the IReV portal is not a collation system, so the upload failure did not by itself invalidate the result, and that the FCT is treated as one of the units counted towards the two-thirds spread, not as an extra requirement. On 26 October 2023, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld that decision.
After 2023, Parliament revisited electronic transmission. The Electoral Act 2026, signed in February 2026, leaves electronic transmission to INEC’s discretion and keeps the paper EC8A result sheet as the primary record of results.
