On the night of 31 March 2015 — before INEC had formally declared the result — President Goodluck Jonathan telephoned the All Progressives Congress candidate Muhammadu Buhari to concede the presidential election. It was the first time a sitting President of Nigeria had lost re-election.
Jonathan's concession is widely credited with averting violence in the South-South and South-East, where his support base had expected him to contest the result. The INEC card-reader, introduced for the first time at this election under Chairman Attahiru Jega, made the result hard to dispute even where it was close.
Buhari was inaugurated on 29 May 2015. Jonathan went on to chair election observer missions across Africa — for the AU, ECOWAS and the National Democratic Institute — becoming, by 2024, the continent's most-requested ex-president for election monitoring. The 2015 alternation is the moment most often cited as the Fourth Republic's coming-of-age.