Claim: Mike Ozekhome, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and member of Atiku Abubakar legal team at the presidential tribunal, claimed recently that Bola Tinubu is the only presidential candidate that did not win in his state in the 2023 presidential elections. 

Verdict: Incorrect

Full story: A twitter user @omoelerinjare on July 5, 2023, posted a video showing the popular lawyer and SAN, Mike Ozekhome claiming that Tinubu was the only presidential candidate that did not win in his state.

18 presidential candidates participated in the 2023 presidential election according to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

In the 2 minutes, 20 seconds video, Mr. Ezekhome said: “we were also able to elicit from the witness that Tinubu did not win in his own state, and he was the only presidential candidate that did not win in his own state, all others won”. See the screenshot of the tweet below:

The video has now had over 33,000 views, 501 likes and 317 retweets and given the volume of engagement which this claim has generated, we verified the veracity of his claim.

Verification: In verifying the claim, we randomly selected three candidates from the list of presidential candidates published in the alphabetical order of the political parties as listed by INEC.

The systematic selection process entailed the random selection of a first candidate from the first-six candidates on the said list. Since it is planned that three candidates will be sampled for the reason of convenience, followed by the selection of every sixth candidate, the next candidate is selected in the case that the sufficient biography of the next sixth candidate is not available at a credible source.

In this case, we selected Omoyele Sowore of the African Action Congress (AAC), Adenuga Sunday Oluwafemi of Boot Party (BP) and Ado-Ibrahim Abdulmalik of Young Progressives Party (YPP) and the claim was tested on each of them.

Omoyele Sowore’s biography published on his campaign website that he hails from Ondo State. The profile of Adenuga Sunday Olufemi published by CivicHive shows that he hails from Ogun State, and the profile of Ado-Ibrahim Abdulmalik published on Stears Election show that he hails from Kogi State.

A scan through the dashboard for the 2023 Nigerian presidential election hosted on the website of the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) shows that none of the selected candidates won in their respective states, that is Ondo, Ogun and Kogi states.

Available data also shows that each of the three states of the selected candidates was won by Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

See a collage of the results of the presidential election in the states of the three selected candidates below.

Conclusion: Available data shows that, while Bola Tinubu lost his own state during the presidential election, results from the states of the three other selected candidates on the list of the 18 presidential candidates show that, none of the selected candidates won in their home state too, thereby invalidating the claim by the senior silk that only Bola Tinubu did not win in his home state. He is not the only one. There were others from the pack.