ABUJA, Nigeria – President Goodluck Jonathan has lost the 2015 presidential elections to leading opposition candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari, Ventures reported.
He therefore becomes Nigeria’s first sitting president to be voted out of office.
The elections, which took place over the weekend, was Nigeria’s most keenly contested since the country’s return to democracy in 1999. Jonathan is also the first president elected president to serve a single tenure in office.
Nigeria's opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) declared an election victory today for former military ruler Buhari and said Africa's most populous nation was witnessing history with its first democratic transfer of power.
The count showed Buhari steamrolling to a landslide against President Goodluck Jonathan, whose People's Democratic Party (PDP) has made no comment since the scale of the political earthquake in Nigeria has become apparent.
With just one of 36 states left to declare, Buhari's APC had 15.1 million votes versus 11.7 for Jonathan and the PDP, according to a Reuters tally.
An APC spokesman told Reuters that there was no reason to doubt Jonathan would concede, in line with a "peace accord" he signed with Buhari before this weekend's vote to allay fears of violence.
Around 800 people were killed in three days of bloodletting in the mainly Muslim north after a Buhari defeat to Jonathan in 2011.
The incoming president, General Muhammadu Buhari, is thought of as a disciplinarian. His short-lived reign as a military head-of-state, after overthrowing the democratic government of Shehu Shagari, was smeared by issues relating to media stifling and excessive use of fear to drive socio-economic policies.
Corruption chronicled
President Jonathan was in office for six years, having acted for two years in place of deposed President Umaru Musa Yar’ auda. His tenure had been marred with issues of corruption, the most prominent being the alleged $20 billion unremmitted revenue by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) into the country’s coffers.
He also failed to act quickly to curtail the Boko Haram menace that plagued the North East during a greater part of his administration, grounding economic activities in the states of Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe.
He however made some significant strides on the economic front. Under his administration, the country’s GDP was rebased to $510 billion, displacing South Africa as the continent’s biggest economy. South Africa holds Africa’s most developed economy. His agricultural strategy has also been lauded globally, as Nigeria is on its way to becoming self sufficient in rice, cassava and a number of agri-commodities. He also supervised the privatization process of the power industry, which was labelled one of the most transparent privatization procedures in the world. But most of these haven’t necessarily improved the life of the average Nigerian.