Islamic cleric Sheikh Ahmad Gumi says Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has sown distrust and suspicion among Nigerians by failing to follow its guidelines for Saturday’s presidential and federal parliamentary elections. 

“The INEC has failed the nation by sowing more distrust and suspicion because it failed to follow its own guidelines in conducting last week’s elections,” Mr Gumi said.

In a post on his Facebook page on Thursday morning, the cleric urged candidates in the just concluded presidential election to seek redress in court and not resort to violence.

“I, therefore, implore the opposition parties as an obligatory national duty to go to the election tribunal and up to the Supreme Court to reestablish the supremacy of law and to teach our younger generation the value of resolving disputes through legal means rather than violence,” Mr Gumi stressed.

In the early hours of Wednesday, INEC chairman Mahmood Yakubu declared Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress winner of Saturday’s presidential election at the National Collation Centre in Abuja.

The declaration of Mr Tinubu as the president-elect came amidst huge protests by PDP and Labour Party, calling for the suspension of result collation and outright cancellation of the presidential poll due to INEC’s failure to upload election results on its server in real-time. 

Mr Tinubu, however, dismissed calls for the cancellation, saying few cases of ballot box snatching and violence experienced during the election are “immaterial” to challenge his victory at the polls.

Mr Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes to defeat PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, winning 12 of 36 states of Nigeria. Mr Abubakar had 6,984,520 votes, and Peter Obi of the Labour Party polled 6,101,533 votes.