Voting began on Saturday in Nigeria’s landmark presidential elections, hours after a failed attempt to blow up the electoral commission marred hopes of a trouble-free poll in the first post-colonial transfer of power between two civilian presidents.
Private vehicles were warned to keep off roads in Lagos and elsewhere and heavily armed troops threw up roadblocks on key thoroughfares, while fresh trouble erupted in the volatile oil-rich south.
It was also unclear whether 65-million ballot papers, ready for distribution only on the eve of the vote on Friday, had arrived safely at the 120 000 polling stations of Africa’s most populous nation.
In the capital, Abuja, where polling stations opened as scheduled at 09h00GMT, police reported a pre-dawn attempt to raze the electoral commission (Inec).
”There was an attempt to burn down the electoral commission’s office this morning at about 4am [03h00GMT]. A fuel tanker fully loaded with petrol was seen moving towards the office and there was no one inside”, police spokesperson Haz Iwendi told Agence France-Presse.
Had the lorry hit its target ”it would have been destruction on the highest scale”, Iwendi said.
He said a stone had been wedged on the accelerator to keep it rolling.
In the southern Niger Delta, which is home to the country’s oil industry, assailants riding speedboats shot at a military base as troops fanned out across Yenagoa, capital of the state of Bayelsa, following shootings and bombings the previous night.
”The soldiers have taken over the streets, they are heavily armed and they are checking every vehicle. They ask people to raise their hands and conduct body checks. They said they are looking for militants”, a witness said.
Gunfire
On Friday night gunfire broke out at a Yenagoa hotel where the ruling party’s vice presidential candidate was staying, and another hotel was reportedly blown up, leaving a number of dead.
It was unclear whether Goodluck Jonathan, who was not hurt and who is also governor of Bayelsa state, had been targeted. A high-ranking government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Jonathan was taken to a safe location.
In Abuja, electoral commission head Maurice Iwu told journalists that all the ballot papers had arrived at commission headquarters in the country’s 36 states and that ”most have already been distributed”.
Officials had earlier ordered a two-hour delay to the start of voting to allow time for the ballots to be distributed by the army in a country twice as big as France.
Due to printing errors, elections for the National Assembly and the Senate, due to have taken place concurrently with the presidential poll, were cancelled in parts of the country, including central Lagos, at the last minute on Saturday.
The ballot-paper mayhem was caused by an 11th-hour decision this week by the country’s Supreme Court to allow Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, who is facing corruption allegations, to run for election. He had previously been disqualified by Inec.
The race to replace President Olesegun Obasanjo will be between three northerners: Umaru Yar’Adua of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Abubakar, who defected from the PDP to run as the candidate for the opposition Action Congress, and former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari.
Iwu assured that the presidential vote would be better handled than last Saturday’s governorship and state assembly elections, marred by fraud and violence that left at least 21 people dead.
”We have learnt good lessons from [last] Saturday’s poll … the election of 2007 will be concluded peacefully, freely and fairly,” Iwu said.
The vote is due to see the first civilian-to-civilian handover since Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960.
While ordinary Nigerians hope Saturday’s election will help to bring an end to the corruption that permeates society, Western powers fear mainly for the stability of Africa’s largest democracy as a major oil source.
Shell, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Total all operate in Nigeria and cross their fingers that existing unrest is not aggravated. World oil prices rose slightly on Friday as traders fretted that continued violence in the run-up to Nigeria’s poll may disrupt supplies from Africa’s biggest crude-producing nation. — AFP
