Nigeria’s election was a failure and must be rerun, local observers said on Sunday, but the government said coup plotters were trying to discredit the poll.
The vote on Saturday in Africa’s most populous nation was marred by violence, fraud and intimidation. First results on Sunday indicated continued dominance by the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP), as was expected.
The election was a far cry from the hoped-for display of democracy to mark the first handover from one civilian president to another in a country scarred by decades of military rule.
”We are going to call for a rerun of elections. You cannot use the result from half of the country to announce a new president,” Innocent Chukwuma, chairperson of biggest local observer group, told Reuters.
But the government said coup plotters were trying to annul the election to wreck democracy after failing to blow up electoral headquarters on Saturday with a petrol tanker.
The tanker stopped short and failed to explode.
The plotters ”failed to get the international community to label Nigeria as a failed state and also incite the rank and file of the Nigerian armed forces with the sole aim of scuttling the presidential elections”, Information Minister Frank Nweke said in a statement.
Government spokesperson Uba Sani accused Senate president Ken Nnamani of wanting to impose an interim government and incite chaos.
Nnamani dismissed what he called ”trumped-up” charges and said he would never support a coup.
Chukwuma, of the Transition Monitoring Group, said the official electoral commission had not been prepared for Saturday’s vote. ”In many parts of the country elections did not start on time or did not start at all,” he said.
Concern
European Union observers have also expressed concern about Saturday’s vote, saying they had witnessed violence, ballot stuffing and a big shortfall in voting slips.
The chief EU observer, Max van den Berg, said he was unsure there had been any improvement over regional polls last week, when there was widespread fraud and 50 people were killed.
”For the moment I am worried,” he told Reuters.
Sixteen people are so far known to have died in violence around Saturday’s vote.
Polling stations in some areas did not open until just before the closing time of 5pm local time.
First results in the north-western state of Sokoto on Sunday showed the PDP ahead, an outcome expected to be repeated across much of Nigeria.
Clear results are not expected before Monday.
There is little suspense among Nigerians, who expect the PDP to have used its incumbent powers to ensure victory.
Optimism was swiftly dashed on Saturday that Nigeria would cement democracy after decades of corrupt military rule, which looted Nigeria’s oil riches and left most of the population in poverty.
Little known state governor Umaru Yar’Adua, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s chosen successor, is favourite to win.
Opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari said no one could claim to have won an election with so many flaws. He said he was likely to call his supporters on to the streets if the PDP announced victory.
Obasanjo, who the opposition accuses of trying to install Yar’Adua as a puppet after he failed to change the Constitution to win a third term, rejected accusations of wholesale rigging.
‘A mess’:
Meanwhile, one of Nigeria’s leading opposition parties on Sunday blasted the country’s election as ”a mess” and complained of ”widespread irregularities”.
The Action Congress (AC) party said in a statement that in preparing Saturday’s poll, the national electoral commission (Inec) had devoted its time to trying to exclude the AC candidate.
It had not spent enough time preparing the poll, the AC said.
Inec had barred AC candidate Vice-President Atiku Abubakar from running for the presidency as he is facing corruption allegations. But the commission’s decision was overturned last week in an 11th-hour ruling by the Supreme Court that caused severe last-minute delays to printing ballot papers.
”Inec has turned what would have been a landmark election into a mess of unimaginable proportion, due to a combination of sheer incompetence and lack of political will,” the AC statement said.
The party also said that in every state where AC has a large following Inec ”deliberately ensured inadequate supply of voting materials.”
”If this is not rigging, we don’t know what else to call it,” the statement continued. — Reuters, AFP