In order to determine President Muhammadu Buhari’s successor while he completes the second of his two legally mandated four-year mandates, Nigerians will cast ballots on February 25.
According to research, there will be six key differences between this general election and the previous ones.
Research indicates that there is a minor chance that none of them will receive the 25% of votes required in two-thirds of the states to win outright. If it occurs, a run-off election would be held for the first time in the nation.
There are currently 18 people vying to succeed him as the head of the continent’s largest economy.
Bola Tinubu, a two-term former governor of Lagos and a prominent member of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party, and Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president running for the office for a record-breaking sixth time, are among the leading candidates.
Peter Obi, a two-time former governor of Anambra for the Labour Party (LP), and Rabiu Kwankwaso, a former defence minister and former governor of the northern metropolis Kano for the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), are also contestants .
Who are the main candidates?
Atiku Abubakar: The PDP continues to be Nigeria’s main opposition, and Atiku Abubakar, a veteran who is running for president for the sixth time, hopes to win and bring the party, which ruled the country from 1999 to 2015, back to power.
He has centered his campaign on uniting the still-divided nation and reviving Nigeria’s faltering economy, which has had two recessions in the past four years.
There is a gentlemanly agreement between the major parties to divide power between the north and south, as well as between Christians and Muslims, in Nigeria, which has a population that is split almost evenly between Christians and Muslims. The outgoing Buhari is a Muslim from the north.
Bola Tinubu: Former political and business allies Tinubu and Atiku, who were among the APC’s founders, will face off on Saturday on opposing sides in an effort to one-up the other.
The former, a two-term governor of Lagos, the financial center of Nigeria, is credited with increasing state revenue, and his admirers predict that he would have similar success on a national scale.
By choosing the former governor of Borno, Kashim Shettima, as his running partner, he has courted controversy by doing something that for more than three decades was unimaginable. Muslims from the southwest and northeast, respectively, Tinubu and Shettima, are both.
Peter Obi: A surprise victor of the election is also expected to be the former governor of the state of Anambra in the southeast, whose ascent and excellent showing so far have effectively disrupted the conventional two-horse race.
Many surveys have forecast a victory for the Labour Party and Obi, who has a sizable following among young Nigerians who are fed up with the way politics is being handled in the continent’s largest economy. He ran for the PDP ticket in 2019 with Abubakar.
Obi, a successful businessman known for his thriftiness and for leading an infrastructure drive while serving as governor, is running with Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, a former senator from the state of Kaduna in the northwest.
Rabiu Kwankwaso: Kwankwaso, who is viewed as a wildcard in the race, has a same amount of experience as the other front-runners. He has held positions in both houses of parliament and was a former defense minister and two-term governor of Kano.
Due to his welfarist politics, he has enormous popularity among young people in his own region. A huge scholarship program that helped thousands of kids from low-income households in Kano, a city formerly infamous for its high concentration of almajirai, or out-of-school child beggars, was a major accomplishment.
Kwankwaso is competing alongside Isaac Idahosa, a Pentecostal Christian bishop from the southern state of Edo.
Youngest voters
The country’s largest and youngest electorate ever will participate in the 2023 elections, according to the ICG, an independent organization that develops policies to support a peaceful world.
“More than 90 million Nigerians, in a population estimated at over 210 million, are eligible to vote in 2023,” the report said. “That number is considerably larger than the 84 million who could cast ballots in 2019 and bigger than the electorate of West Africa’s fourteen other countries combined.”
According to Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) figures, 7.28 million, or 76% of the new voters, are between the ages of 18 and 34. This is a rise of 51% from the 2019 election.
The ICG also stated that this increase in young voters may be explained by the fact that many young people entered politics in October 2020 when they demonstrated against police brutality. They felt empowered to strive for better government as a result of this.
Technology
The Electoral Act of 2022, which enables the 2023 elections to feature innovations like the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, which combines fingerprint and face biometrics to verify voters’ identities, and the electronic transmission of results from polling units directly to the INEC Result Viewing Portal, is the next characteristic that sets the 2023 election apart from previous ones.
Highest Number of Voters
The largest electorate in Nigerian history will vote in the 2023 elections, according to ICG research titled “Mitigating Risks of Violence in Nigeria’s Elections.”
INEC published its final voter list early in January, which included 93.4 million persons, an increase from 84 million in the 2019 election (an increase of 11 percent). The increased number of registered voters could provide significant logistical difficulties during the 2023 election.
Security Challenges
In addition to the unrest in some areas of the nation, the Independent National Electoral Commission’s state offices have come under attack (INEC).
Although there has been a long-standing pattern of violence around Nigeria’s often hotly contested elections, analysts think the most recent wave is more sophisticated and precise. Election postponement is not being considered, according to INEC.