LAGOS: Outsider Peter Obi defeated his ruling party challenger to win Nigeria's commercial hub of Lagos on Monday, in an upset two days after a presidential election marred by delays and complaints of irregularities.
A Reuters tally suggested that Bola Tinubu, of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party, was well ahead in other areas - though around two thirds of states in Africa's most populous country still have to declare.
But the win in Lagos state was a major boost for Labour Party leader Obi, whose run shook up politics by challenging candidates from the two long-established movements that have alternated in power since the end of army rule in 1999.
Obi got 582,454 votes in Lagos state, ahead of 572,606 Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos who had focused a lot of his campaign there. Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition People's Democratic Party (PDP), came third with 75,750 according to provisional electoral commission data.
Obi's campaign grabbed headlines with its use of social media and its focus on young people and urban voters fed up with widespread corruption and insecurity.
Across the country, Tinubu led with about 3.29 million votes, against 2.28 million for Abubakar and 818,000 for Obi, according to a Reuters tally from 10 states out of 36 so far collated by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
To become president, a candidate needs to get more votes than any other candidate and also garner a quarter of the votes in at least 24 states.
By 12:00 GMT, INEC had uploaded results from 56,235 polling units out of a total 178,846, its website showed.
"We take full responsibility for the problems and regret the distress that they have caused the candidates, political parties and the electorate," the Commission said
All three parties complained of irregularities. Obi's Labour Party castigated the electoral body for the failure, in many places, to immediately upload results directly from each polling unit to its website, as it had promised to do to guarantee transparency.
There have been reports of violence and intimidation, though not at this stage on the scale of previous elections.
In northern Kano state, police said a group had attacked a campaign office for a smaller opposition party and set the building on fire, killing two people. - Reuters
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