President Olusegun Obasanjo has won Nigeria’s presidential election, according to official results released in Lagos on Tuesday.
With 764 of Nigeria’s 774 local government districts having declared their results, Obasanjo had an unassailable lead and passed the minimum threshold for victory with 25% support in at least two thirds of Nigeria’s 36 states.
With 41 331 691 votes counted, Obasanjo had 24 109 157 or 61,8% of the vote, while his main challenger Muhammadu Buhari trailed on 12 495 326 or 32%.
A spokesperson for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Steve Osemeke, told reporters that a news conference would be held at 6pm (1700 GMT) to announce the winner.
Observers have doubts about election
International observers feared that stolen ballot boxes and fudged tallies could compromise Nigerians’ confidence in elections that pose a key test to democracy and stability in Africa’s most populous nation.
Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated northern opposition rejected the weekend ballot as a ”huge joke” after President Olusegun Obasanjo, a southwestern Christian, took a commanding lead despite stiff northern opposition.
The condemnation by the party of Muhammadu Buhari, Obasanjo’s ain challenger, reinforced Nigeria’s often-violent ethnic and religious divide.
”The entire so-called election is a huge joke,” Sam Nda-Isai, said Buhari’s campaign spokesperson. ”As far as we are concerned, democracy has failed.”
Journalists and observers witnessed apparent corruption, including ballot box theft and bribery.
”We have serious concerns about the legitimacy of the results in certain constituencies,” said Kenneth Wollack, president of the Washington-based National
Democratic Institution.
In Rivers state, a restive area where Obasanjo won 92%, ”you could hardly say an election was conducted,” he said.
Wollack called for ”extraordinary steps” to reform Nigeria’s electoral process to restore public confidence in democracy.
Nigeria’s election commission has promised to overturn results in cases of proven fraud. Yet commission chief Abel Guobadia insisted the vote was clean.
”As far as we are concerned, (so far) there has been no rigging,” Guobadia said.
Buhari, a junta leader who led a 1983 coup after an election widely derided as flawed, is a Muslim and a member of the Fulani ethnic group, with a support base in the north.
Obasanjo, a Christian and ethnic Yoruba who was also a military leader in the 1970s, is most popular in his home region of the southwest.
Nearly half of Nigeria’s 126 million people registered for the balloting. An official turnout figure was unavailable, but officials said it was strong.
Buhari’s representative declined to say if the opposition would launch violent protests as Buhari and others have repeatedly threatened. Party leaders were to meet Tuesday or Wednesday.
The election for president and 36 governors was the biggest test for democracy since Obasanjo was elected four years ago, ending 15 years of brutal military rule.
Nigeria has never seen a civilian government successfully hand over power to another. Though it is one of the world’s largest oil exporters, it is desperately poor and has a history of coups and unrest.
Obasanjo’s rule has brought limited improvement in individual and press freedoms. Yet the economy has stagnated, and critics say Obasanjo has done little to fight poverty and corruption.
Since he took power in 1999, 10 000 people have been killed in religious, political and ethnic fighting, including hundreds massacred by army troops.
The Saturday vote was marred by a shooting that left six killed in the oil delta, the scene of a month of ethnic and political violence leaving more than 100 people dead.
Festus Okoye, chairman of the Transitional Monitoring Group, which had 10 000 election observers across the country, dismissed results in several Niger Delta states showing close to 100% turnout and 90 percent support for Obasanjo.
The group’s observers witnessed ”scores of cases” of rigging, ballot box theft, bribery and intimidation, ”often with the collusion of electoral officials and security personnel,” Okoye said.
In one case, the observers watched election commission officials cart away ballot boxes and voting cards to the home of a local politician in southeastern Imo state, where political thugs filled out the entire town’s ballots.
George Folsom, chief executive of the US-based International Republican Institute, said he personally found eight ballot boxes and several baskets filled with completed ballots dumped in a ravine in Port Harcourt. – Sapa-AP