President Olusegun Obasanjo was last night tipped to win a second term in Nigeria’s presidential elections as the country braced itself for clashes between rival ethnic, religious and political groups.
Obasanjo took the lead in early returns from Saturday’s vote but an official in the party of his main challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, claimed there was ”massive rigging” and warned of violent protests.
Police and army units patrolled cities and erected checkpoints at potential flashpoints around the country. The northern city of Kaduna was braced for fresh clashes between Muslims and Christians.
Isolated incidents of intimidation and violence left up to six dead on Saturday: not a heavy toll by Nigerian standards, but the security forces said they were more worried about violence erupting after the result was announced.
Several presidential candidates, including Buhari, promised to take supporters to the streets if they lost and there was evidence of rigging.
”This is massive rigging,” Francis Erube, a Lagos state official in Buhari’s party, told the Associated Press. ”The masses are going to react.”
Catering for more than 60 million voters strained the under-resourced electoral commission, but observers said the poll went much more smoothly than the previous week’s parliamentary election.
The turnout seemed high, with orderly queues of people waiting to ink their left forefinger and smudge a ballot sheet. Of a dozen polling stations the Guardian visited in Lagos, not one reported serious problems as agents from political parties and international monitors mingled with police.
In the slums of Mushin a party agent seen stuffing some blank ballots down his trousers handed them back after being jostled and reprimanded by a crowd of voters.
Elsewhere there were more serious disruptions. In the oil-producing delta, ethnic Ijaw militants boycotted the poll in a row over polling boundaries.
An Associated Press photographer in Warri saw men loading ballot boxes and voting cards into a car outside an election commission headquarters, and in the northern city of Maiduguri a local politician allegedly threw bundles of bank notes out of his car window.
Election monitors were more concerned about fraud during the counting. Opposition parties cried foul after Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic party won a majority in the parliamentary election.
Most agree poverty and corruption are the main problems for a country which emerged four years ago from a series of military dictatorships.
But the presidential race has split along ethnic and religious lines. The incumbent is a southern Christian and Buhari is a northern Muslim who backs the wider use of Islamic law.
With more than 14 million votes counted in 21 states and the federal capital territory, Obasanjo had 69%, or 10 295 246 ballots, compared with 26%, or 3 848 871 ballots, for Buhari. – Guardian Unlimited Â