With ballots from all 36 states counted, the All-Progressives Congress (APC) garnered 8,805,655 votes, compared with 6,984,520 for Atiku Abubakar’s People’s Democratic Party and 6,101,554 for Peter Obi of the Labour Party. The election turnout was 35.6 percent, the electoral commission said, which compared with 44% in the 2019 presidential election.

“Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC, having satisfied the requirements of the law and scored the highest number of votes, is hereby declared the winner,” Mahmood Yakubu, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), told election officials and reporters in the early hours of Wednesday.

Tinubu won in 12 states, while Abubakar was victorious in 12.

To win in the first round, the victor must get at least a quarter of the votes in two-thirds of the states plus an overall majority, and Tinubu appeared to have won enough to avoid a runoff.

Bashir Ahmad, one of Buhari’s advisers, posted on Twitter a picture of the president laughing with the slogan “TinubuHasWon”.

“I’m not aware of any meeting of the PDP legal team, but I know there are concerns laid before the INEC chairman based on promises he made to Nigerians on the conduct of the elections,” Kola Ologbondiyan, a PDP spokesman, said. “When he addresses those concerns, then we will know what to do.”

Tinubu and Atiku are both northern Muslims in their 70s who have long been in politics.