Nigeria on Wednesday condemned the damning reports issued by foreign observers and some international media on last weekend ‘s presidential and state elections.
”Some of the observers and some media came in here with a pre-conceived idea,” Information Minister Jerry Gana said at a televised press interview, attended some of the foreign observers and journalists.
Gana singled out for criticism a report issued by European Union observers and accounts of the elections broadcast by CNN television, the Voice of America and the BBC.
Observers from the European Union and the Commonwealth severely criticised the polls, which saw incumbent President Olusegun Obasanjo re-elected with 62% of the vote, nearly twice that of his nearest rival, Muhammadu Buhari of the All Nigeria People’s Party.
”Election day for the presidential and gubernatorial elections was marred by serious irregularities throughout the country and fraud in at least 11 states,” the EU monitors said in a statement.
They said 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 President Olusegun 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.
”It is difficult to accept the scathing remarks made by the EU team,” Gana said.
He said a report by CNN on Wednesday afternoon gave the impression that Nigeria was about to ”blow up”.
”Nigerians love democracy and they have voted peacefully… So nobody should incite them against what they have decided,” said the apparently angry minister in a seeming angry tone.
He said Nigeria would ”protest very firmly and decisively” to CNN headquarters in Atlanta about Wednesday’s broadcast, adding that if the channel did not take action against the reporter who filed the report, the government would be ”forced to ask him, on behalf of the people of Nigeria, to leave our country alone”.
In February, the Lagos state government also threatened to formally protest to CNN headquarters over what it considered was a biased report on violent ethnic clashes in a rundown district of the city. – Sapa-AFP