Following the conduct of general election on February 25, the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) has disclosed plan to issue Certificates of Return to 521 winners of senatorial and national House of Representatives elections.
Professor Mahmood Yakubu, the INEC Chairman, stated this in an address over the weekend while he hinted that Nigeria is about to have its most diverse national assembly in terms of political party representation since democracy returned to the country in 1999.
According to him, winners have been declared for 423 national legislative seats while supplementary elections will be held in 46 constituencies, adding that in the Senate, 98 out of 109 seats have been declared.
“So far, seven political parties have won senatorial seats while in the House of Representatives, 325 out of 360 seats have been won by eight political parties. In terms of party representation, this is the most diverse national assembly since 1999.
“Certificates of Return will be presented to Senators-elect on Tuesday 7th March 2023 at 11.00am at the National Collation Centre (the International Conference Centre), Abuja, while Members of the House of Representatives-elect will receive theirs the following day, Wednesday 8th March 2023, at 11.00am at the same venue.
“However, for effective crowd management, each Senator/Member-elect should be accompanied by a maximum of two guests. The comprehensive list of all members-elect will be uploaded to the Commission’s website shortly,” he said.
92% of election results on IREV
Meanwhile, INEC has so far uploaded 161,624 results from 176,846 polling units, as of Sunday, eight days after the presidential poll.
The figure represents 92 per cent of results from all the polling units, although the electronic transmission of results was still ongoing as the
Nigerians expected that the election results would be uploaded on election day as promised by the INEC Chairman in the days leading to the election.
However, INEC came under fire for its failure to upload results to its viewing portal which led to the walkout of some party agents on Monday at the National Collation Centre.
Checks by our correspondent on Sunday revealed that the results of all the polling units were yet to be uploaded on the INEC website.
According to the Commission, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the candidate for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), won 8.8 million votes, while main opposition candidates Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of Labour Party (LP) had 6.9 million and 6.1 million, respectively.
