Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo’s party secured control of parliament on Thursday, two days before a landmark presidential election, as the opposition called for ”mass action” to protest alleged vote-rigging.
Obasanjo’s victory in last week’s parliamentary elections confirms him as the frontrunner for Nigeria’s first presidential poll since the end of military rule, a key test of the country’s young democracy.
But opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari, who in 1983 overthrew the last civilian president to win re-election, has accused the president’s party of rigging the parliamentary vote and urged his supporters to resist further fraud.
”We are not boycotting the election. We are calling for mass action. We’re asking for Nigerians to defend their vote,” the former military dictator told reporters Wednesday in the Nigerian capital Abuja.
Buhari has called for the results of last week’s elections to be cancelled and re-run in most of Nigeria’s 36 states, alleging ”massive fraud” by Obasanjo’s supporters.
Nigeria’s electoral commission, however, has said it has no power to cancel the results, and Obasanjo’s camp has angrily accused Buhari of undermining Nigeria’s four-year-old experiment with democracy.
”To suggest that we should cancel or boycott is, to say the least, the most treacherous comment a Nigerian could make at this time in our democracy,” said Audu Ogbeh, chairman of Obasanjo’s ruling party.
With five-sixths of constituencies declared, the president’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) had won 181 of the the 360 seats in Nigeria’s lower house, the National Assembly, with 54 percent of the vote.
In the upper house, the Senate, the PDP had 60 of the 109 seats with only 18 more left to declare after last weekend’s nationwide vote.
Buhari’s ANPP, the largest of 29 opposition parties, was trailing on 82 lower house and 26 senatorial districts.
The disputed vote has provoked the worst political crisis in Africa’s most populous nation since the military handed over power to Obasanjo in a largely stage-managed election in 1999.
Nigeria has never passed power from one civilian government to another in 43 years of independence, and the weekend’s controversial polls have sparked anger and violent clashes in many areas.
Few observers believe that the military could or would step in again to take control, as it has so often since Nigeria won independence from Britain in 1960.
But in a country where localised ethnic, political and religious feuding has claimed at least 10 000 lives in the four years since Obasanjo came to power, the bitterness provoked by the election has sparked fears of more blood-letting.
On Monday and Tuesday rioting opposition supporters torched a home and a shopping centre belonging to two prominent Obasanjo supporters in the northern state of Katsina, witnesses said.
And on Wednesday youths took to the streets of the southern market city of Onitsha calling for the parliamentary results to be cancelled and setting bonfires until they were dispersed by riot police, said a local journalist.
Foreign election observers were generally positive about last week’s vote, saying there was less violence than expected, but also complaining of late opening, the lack of a secret ballot and counting irregularities.
The problems were at their worst in Nigeria’s troubled south and southeast, where the vast profits of Nigeria’s oil industry have made elected office a lucrative prize worth fighting over.
Elections did not take place in Enugu State and barely began in the southern state of Rivers, which includes the large oil city of Port Harcourt, independent monitors and witnesses said.
”Some observers witnessed serious irregularities in the collation of results … in Enugu and Rivers State. A few observers were obstructed while carrying out their duties,” EU observers said in a statement.
Witnesses and Nigerian poll monitors said that most polling stations never opened in Rivers, yet local election officials returned results indicating a high turnout and 92 percent support for the ruling party.
An attempt to re-hold Enugu’s elections on Wednesday was boycotted by the opposition. – Sapa-AFP