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June 12, 1993: the election Nigeria never officially counted

An interactive map of Nigeria's annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election, Abiola (SDP) versus Tofa (NRC), on the state boundaries as they stood in 1993, with the unofficial result that was never declared.

election-updatesJune 12, 20265 min read
THE JUNE 12 RECORD
Lagos · Saturday, June 12, 1993 · Vol. INever printed · Published 12 June 2026

In honour of Nigeria's long struggle for democracy, those so often overlooked, and of the journalists who paid, in silence and in sacrifice, to speak truth to power.

By Femi OlamijuloReporting, data & interactive map · E Don Kast

On 12 June 1993, Nigerians voted in what observers widely regard as the fairest election in the country's history. Then the result was annulled, before it was ever officially declared.

Chief M.K.O. Abiola of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) defeated Alhaji Bashir Tofa of the National Republican Convention (NRC). But on 23 June 1993 the military government annulled the election, suspended the electoral commission, and no official tally was ever released. Not until 2025, in his memoir A Journey in Service, did Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, the military president who annulled it, finally concede that Abiola won. The figures below are the unofficial results, reconstructed from contemporaneous returns and checked against the historical record.

‘Waiting for the verdict’, Newswatch, 21 June 1993. Via Archivi.ng.
The two presidential candidates, 12 June 1993. Tap a card for a short biography.

The map and table below plot each state's result on the boundaries as they stood in 1993: the 30-state structure created in 1991, plus the Federal Capital Territory. Select a state on either and it lights up on both.

SDP 58.36%
41.64% NRC
Abiola: 8,341,30914,293,396 votes castTofa: 5,952,087
Coloured by winning party
SDP: Abiola (19 states + FCT)NRC: Tofa (11 states)Hover or tap a state for detail
Provisional results by state, 12 June 1993 (unofficial; no official count was ever released). Sort a column or filter; selecting a state syncs with the map.
Won by
105,273151,227256,500991,56925.9%45,954Tofa
140,875167,239308,114954,68032.3%26,364Tofa
214,787199,342414,1291,032,95540.1%15,445Abiola
212,024159,258371,2821,248,22629.7%52,766Abiola
339,339524,836864,1752,048,62742.2%185,497Tofa
246,830186,302433,1321,297,07233.4%60,528Abiola
153,496128,684282,1801,222,53323.1%24,812Abiola
189,303153,452342,755876,59939.1%35,851Abiola
327,277145,001472,2781,155,18240.9%182,276Abiola
205,407103,572308,979912,68033.9%101,835Abiola
263,101284,050547,1511,291,75042.4%20,949Tofa
19,96818,31338,281152,08025.2%1,655Abiola
159,350195,836355,1861,441,63024.6%36,486Tofa
138,55289,836228,3881,230,21518.6%48,716Abiola
389,713356,860746,5731,614,25846.2%32,853Abiola
169,619154,809324,4282,583,05712.6%14,810Abiola
171,162271,077442,2391,661,13226.6%99,915Tofa
70,219144,808215,027824,25426.1%74,589Tofa
222,760265,732488,492978,01949.9%42,972Tofa
272,27080,209352,479669,62552.6%192,061Abiola
883,965149,4321,033,3972,397,42143.1%734,533Abiola
136,350221,437357,7871,002,17335.7%85,087Tofa
425,72559,246484,971941,88951.5%366,479Abiola
883,024162,9941,046,0181,767,89659.2%720,030Abiola
365,26672,068437,3341,056,69041.4%293,198Abiola
536,011105,788641,7991,579,28040.6%430,223Abiola
417,565259,394676,9591,518,18644.6%158,171Abiola
370,578640,9731,011,5511,908,87853.0%270,395Tofa
97,726372,250469,9761,636,11928.7%274,524Tofa
101,88764,001165,888769,91221.5%37,886Abiola
111,88764,061175,948665,29926.4%47,826Abiola
National8,341,3095,952,08714,293,39639,429,88636.3%2,389,222Abiola
Turnout = votes cast ÷ registered voters on the 1993 roll (attested by both African Concord and Emelifeonwu, 1999). Tap a row to highlight that state on the map.

A landslide, then silence

Nationally, Abiola took 8,341,309 votes (58.4%) to Tofa's 5,952,087 (41.6%), a margin of nearly 2.4 million out of 14,293,396 cast. He won 19 states and the FCT to Tofa's 11, carrying support across ethnic and regional lines, even into the North. That breadth is why June 12 endures as a symbol of national unity, and why it is now Nigeria's official Democracy Day.

It would not have stood alone. By 1993 Abiola's SDP already controlled both chambers of the National Assembly (52 Senate seats to the NRC's 37, and 314 House seats to 275), with the 30 governorships split evenly. A presidential win would have completed the party's federal mandate.

Abiola’s ‘Hope ’93 — Farewell to Poverty’ campaign, TELL, 14 June 1993. Via Archivi.ng. Tap to enlarge.

The press that would not be silenced

When the regime moved to bury the result, it was Nigeria's independent press, not the electoral commission, that refused to let it disappear. The Campaign for Democracy defied military decree to circulate news of Abiola's victory, and magazines like Tell, TheNews and Tempo kept the annulment in print under constant siege. The proscriptions came fast: roughly 17 titles banned and some 300,000 copies seized in 1993 alone, with dozens of journalists arrested. They hardened after Gen. Sani Abacha seized power that November. Under Abacha the Concord Group (owned by Abiola), the Punch and The Guardian were all shut down in one of the longest press bans in Nigerian history. Four journalists (Kunle Ajibade, George Mbah, Ben Charles Obi and Christine Anyanwu) were convicted by a secret military tribunal in 1995 on coup-plot charges widely seen as a pretext to silence the press, and handed long sentences later commuted. In 1998 the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights ruled the newspaper proscriptions a violation of free expression.

What happened next

  1. 12 Jun 1993
    Nigerians vote; Abiola (SDP) defeats Tofa (NRC).
  2. 18 Jun 1993
    With the count halted, the Campaign for Democracy leaks an unofficial result: Abiola ahead, ~58% (19 states and the FCT).
  3. 23 Jun 1993
    Gen. Ibrahim Babangida annuls the election.
  4. 26 Aug 1993
    Babangida “steps aside”; an interim government takes over.
  5. 17 Nov 1993
    Gen. Sani Abacha seizes power.
  6. 11 Jun 1994
    Abiola proclaims himself president at Epetedo, Lagos; he is arrested days later and detained.
  7. 4 Jun 1996
    His wife, Kudirat Abiola, is assassinated in Lagos.
  8. 8 Jun 1998
    Abacha dies; Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar takes over.
  9. 7 Jul 1998
    Abiola dies in detention, days before his expected release.
  10. 29 May 1999
    Civilian rule is restored under Olusegun Obasanjo.
  11. 19 years
    6 Jun 2018
    June 12 is declared Democracy Day; Abiola is honoured posthumously with the GCFR (Grand Commander of the Federal Republic), the nation’s highest title.
  12. 8 years
    June 2026 · E Don Kast
    E Don Kast maps Nigeria’s 176,000+ polling units and opens them to crowdsourced, verifiable results: the count made visible, polling unit by polling unit. It begins with Ekiti, days from now.

How we counted, and what it still costs

The page the regime banned: African Concord, 21 June 1993, printed the full state-by-state presidential result. The magazine (owned by Abiola) was shut down. Scan via Archivi.ng.
Because the count was killed before it could be certified, there is no single official tally, only the records that survived, and they do not perfectly agree. That is the point, not a flaw. Concord went to press on 21 June with the returns it had. Its page even carries two national totals that don't match each other (a declared 8,128,720 beside a row-sum of 8,187,023), the mark of a count still arriving rather than one signed off. As more returns came in over the following weeks, the figure scholars later settled on rose to Abiola's 8,341,309, the number we use here. Through all of it the winner and the 19-states-plus-FCT pattern never change; only the last few hundred thousand votes do.
How the surviving counts compare
Fuller returns, reconciled by scholars (used here) · 1999
SDP 58.4%
41.6% NRC
Abiola 8,341,309margin 2,389,222Tofa 5,952,087
The fuller count after late returns (Newswatch 28 Jun, Tell 5 Jul): 212,589 more for Abiola than the 21 June figure, and still never officially certified.
The wider record is just as sobering. Turnout was about 36.3% nationwide and far lower in places (Kano 12.6%, Jigawa 18.6%), with voters who couldn't find their names in the register and farmers who couldn't leave their fields to vote. The result was something Nigerians could hear on the BBC and pass hand to hand in photocopies, yet never see officially counted. Three decades on, low turnout, broken rolls, and that same gap (between a result people can see and one they can trust) still shadow Nigerian elections. Closing it, polling unit by polling unit, is the whole reason E Don Kast exists.

This is the same results-mapping we build for elections as they happen. See it live at app.edonkast.com/results.

Sources & method

The state-by-state and national figures follow the standard scholarly reference: Nohlen, Krennerich & Thibaut, Elections in Africa: A Data Handbook (Oxford University Press, 1999), cross-checked against the African Elections Database, which lists the totals explicitly (Abiola 8,341,309 / Tofa 5,952,087 / 14,293,396), and the state table (Table 6.1) in David Emelifeonwu's McGill doctoral thesis (1999), which itself drew on Newswatch and Tell. The contemporaneous tally African Concord risked publishing on 21 June 1993 (reproduced under How we counted above, via Archivi.ng) gives slightly lower figures, the count still being incomplete; registered-voter totals, however, match. Widely-circulated transcriptions (including the 2018 Vanguard series and some blogs) carry digit-level errors in a few states (Lagos, Yobe, Rivers), corrected here against these records.

Press suppression: the proscription figures (≈17 titles banned by decree, ≈300,000 publications seized in 1993) are from Michèle Maringues, "The Nigerian Press," in Nigeria during the Abacha Years (IFRA-Nigeria); the 1995 secret-tribunal convictions of Kunle Ajibade, George Mbah, Ben Charles Obi and Christine Anyanwu (later commuted) are documented by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The free-expression ruling is Media Rights Agenda v. Nigeria (ACHPR, Comms. 105/93 et al., 31 Oct 1998). Democracy Day and the posthumous GCFR (June 2018): Punch. Boundaries: Nigeria's 1991 state structure.

The 1992 National Assembly tallies are taken from contemporaneous Newswatch reporting (20 July 1992 and 21 June 1993), digitised by Archivi.ng.

Unofficial: the June 12, 1993 election was annulled and no official count was ever released.