Nigeria’s presidential election stood on the brink of crisis on Wednesday as the main opposition candidate rejected the results of a parliamentary poll and localised protests erupted.
Former putsch leader Muhammadu Buhari’s camp accused supporters of President Olusegun Obasanjo of rigging last weekend’s poll, sharply raising political tensions three days before the crucial presidential vote.
Rioters burned an electoral office, and a home and a shopping centre belonging to leading Obasanjo supporters in two towns in the northern state of Katsina in protests on Monday and Tuesday, witnesses and police said.
But the opposition has stopped short of threatening to boycott the upcoming presidential and state gubernatorial votes, which have been billed as the next key test for Nigeria’s young democracy.
Obasanjo’s ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was on course to win the legislative election, Nigeria’s first civilian-run vote in 20 years, as the results continued to trickle in on Wednesday.
With declarations in from more than three-quarters of constituencies, the PDP had a healthy lead with 53% of the vote and 170 of the 287 seats so far declared in Nigeria’s 360-seat lower house.
Buhari’s All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) was trailing on 81 seats and 27% of the vote.
Opposition leaders and many independent observers allege there had been widespread ballot-rigging and intimidation, despite most foreign observer groups giving the election a cautious thumbs-up.
Buhari was to hold a news conference on Thursday alongside two more presidential candidates, former Biafran secessionist leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu and former state governor Jim Nwobodo, his representative said.
”The rigging and fraud that attended the collation of the results of the just-concluded election is so blatant that 1983 now looks like some child’s play,” said Buhari’s office, branding the poll ”a coup against democracy”.
In 1983 Buhari seized power in a military coup less than four months after a notoriously fraudulent election. That was Nigeria’s last attempt to pass power from one civilian regime to another.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) rejected the ANPP’s charge that the poll was marred by ”massive rigging”.
”Nigerians are bad losers,” said INEC reperesentative Sam Okpo.
”The grounds on which they claim the results should be cancelled do not hold.”
And Obasanjo’s camp reacted angrily, warning that Buhari’s move could damage Nigeria’s attempts to secure itself a democratic future.
”This is one of the tragedies of African politics, in which losers refuse to accept defeat even when it is genuine,” said Obasanjo’s campaign representative Akin Osuntokun.
”Statements on such an event should not be made flippantly because of the danger it portends to the survival of of our democracy,” he said.
Saturday’s vote was Nigeria’s first since the end of military rule in 1999 and Africa’s biggest ever, with more than 60-million registered voters spread across the continent’s most populous country.
Monitors have criticised the organisation of the poll, which began late in many areas, had no provision for voting in secret, and in which vote counting was often conducted under opaque circumstances.
”We were very pleased at the low level of violence. The question of how free and fair it was is a whole other set of criteria that has yet to be shown,” a US State Department official said in Washington.
Independent Nigerian monitors reported at least a dozen deaths, mainly in the southeast, along with gun-battles between factions, theft of ballot boxes, burnt-down polling stations and attacks on party supporters.
Nigeria’s electoral agency has admitted to some of these problems and is to conduct new polls in districts of three states where fraud was rampant.
Obasanjo must win a majority of the vote nationwide and at least a quarter of votes cast in two-thirds of Nigeria’s 36 states to avoid going to a second round run-off for the presidency, probably against Buhari. – Sapa-AFP