Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo won a landmark election victory as observers slammed ballot rigging and intimidation in a chaotic vote which left at least 17 dead.
Obasanjo beat his closest challenger and fellow former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari by a margin of two votes to one according to official results released after more than 98% of districts had declared.
”I place in God’s almighty hands my personal victory from last Saturday’s presidential elections which has been formally declared by the Independent National Electoral Commision,” said Obasanjo.
”I humbly accept the challenge to consolidate the gains of the last four years while charting the course to a greater destiny for our nation,” he said.
The 65-year-old former general will now prepare a new government to rule Africa’s most populous nation, a vast and divided country where 120 million live amidst poverty and insecurity despite their huge oil revenues.
But Obasanjo’s historic achievement — winning the first civilian-run election in 20 years — was tainted by news of violence during the election weekend and serious criticisms of the polls by international observers.
”Election day for the presidential and gubernatorial elections was marred by serious irregularities throughout the country and fraud in at least 11” of Nigeria’s 36 states, European Union monitors said in a statement released here.
The observers said that a quarter of their officials had personally witnessed fraud including ”stuffing of ballot boxes, forgery of results, falsification of result sheets, ballot box snatching and a variety of other means of rigging”, principally in states won by Obasanjo’s ruling party.
The smaller Commonwealth observation mission complained of fraud in two of the states it visited: Enugu, the restless heartland of the Igbo ethnic group, and Rivers, home to Nigeria’s multi-billion dollar oil industry.
The US State Department said that widespread claims of electoral malfeasance in Nigeria’s national elections appear to be credible.
Spokesperson Richard Boucher noted that Nigeria’s electoral laws provide for investigation and redress.
”We urge all parties with complaints of electoral malfeasance to present their evidence to the competent tribunals and for the tribunals the consider those complaints in a fair and transparent manner,” Boucher said.
Buhari’s camp fell on the international criticism as evidence to support its own claim that it had been cheated of victory.
”Any government that is formed on the basis of this fraudulent election result will be illegitimate,” said Sam Nda-Isaiah, Buhari’s spokesperson.
Nda-Isaiah noted that the EU monitors had said the election had been marred by fraud in 11 states, and added: ”By our own estimation, elections did not take place in about 15 states.”
”Our minimum demand is that new elections should be held in these areas under the supervision of the international community,” he said.
Opposition anger at the result has raised fears that Nigeria will have to live through another period of instability and violence while Obasanjo tries to stamp his authority on his divided country.
In central Benue State, meanwhile, polling day was marked by a bloody clash between soldiers and opposition youths which left between eight and 12 of Buhari’s supporters dead, police and officials said.
”Soldiers were deployed to Kwande to ensure peace during and after Saturday’s poll when they were shot at by youths,” police spokesperson Bode Fakaye said by telephone from the troubled state.
”Eight people were killed on the spot and 12 were seriously injured. The soldiers fired back at the victims in self-defence,” he said.
Benue State’s co-ordinator of relief materials, Shima Atayi, said that up to 12 people may have been killed in the clash in Kwande, where he said opposition backers had mounted a reign of terror to prevent people voting for Obasanjo’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
In Ilorin, the capital of Kwara State in southwest Nigeria, police said three PDP supporters had been shot dead and several injured on Sunday as they celebrated victory in the previous day’s gubernatorial poll.
Obasanjo’s daughter, meanwhile, escaped unhurt when a convoy of private cars in which she was travelling was fired on on Sunday, but five people with her were killed, said presidential spokesperson Akin Osuntokun.
Iyabo Obasanjo had been travelling back from her home village near Obasanjo’s farm estate in southwestern Nigeria on Sunday when her convoy was ambushed by unidentified gunmen who killed a bodyguard, a driver, one of her relatives and two young children, he said.
It was not clear whether the attack was politically motivated, he said, and armed robberies are common in Nigeria.
Nigerian poll observers have reported that six opposition supporters were killed Saturday by men in military uniform in Bayelsa State, a lawless oil-producing area in Niger Delta which borders on Rivers.
”Proper electoral processes appear to have broken down. The official results which emerged … bore little relation to the evidence gathered by our observers on the ground,” the Commonwealth report said.
Nigeria has never successfully passed power from one elected regime to another. When it tried in 1983 the government was overthrown four months later in a military coup led by Buhari. – Sapa-AFP