Nigeria on Sunday announced initial results after a tight election for the presidency of Africa’s most populous nation, marked by widespread voting delays and early accusations of attempts to manipulate ballot counts.
Nearly 90 million were eligible to vote on Saturday for a successor to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, with many hoping a new leader would do a better job tackling insecurity, economic malaise and growing poverty.
The election went ahead mostly peacefully, despite some ransacked polling stations and late starts at many others. Voters stayed up late at night in many locations to observe the count and “protect” the ballots.
Photo: Reuters
The election pits former Lagos governor Bola Tinubu, 70, of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) against former Nigerian vice president Atiku Abubakar, 76, of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
However, for the first time since the end of military rule in 1999, a surprise third-party candidate, Labour Party’s Peter Obi, has challenged the APC and PDP dominance with a message of change and an appeal to younger voters.
Announcing first results state by state, the Independent National Electoral Commission said that the APC’s Tinubu easily won small, southwestern Ekiti state with the PDP coming second.
The result was very preliminary in a nation almost equally divided between a mostly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south. Voting has often been determined by large key states such as Lagos and northwestern Kano and Kaduna.
To win the presidency, a candidate must get the most votes, but also win at least 25 percent of votes cast in two-thirds of Nigeria’s 36 states to reflect wide representation, but slow uploading of results to the commission’s Web site on Sunday provoked worries of electoral malpractice in a nation with a history of ballot-rigging and vote-buying.
Abubakar urged the commission to upload the results immediately after accusing some state governors of trying to compromise the results.
“It will be a disservice to Nigerians and a negation to democracy for anyone to subvert the will of the people as freely expressed in their votes of yesterday,” he said in a statement on Sunday.
When he was defeated by Buhari in the 2019 election, Abubakar claimed massive fraud, but the Nigerian Supreme Court eventually rejected his challenge.
Labour Party chairman Julius Abure also accused election officials of failing to upload results from parts of Lagos and southern Delta State to help the ruling APC’s candidate.
Observers group Yiaga Africa said it was “deeply concerned with the delay” in results, but the commission said the problems with uploading results on its IReV data page were due “technical hitches” and there was no risk of tampering.
“The commission wishes to assure Nigerians that the challenges are not due to any intrusion or sabotage of our systems,” it said in a statement. “It is important to avoid statements and actions that can heat up the polity at this time.”
In Lagos and other cities, crowds stormed polling stations late on Saturday as electoral officials tallied the first results by hand and read out the counts before transmitting them to the central database.
On Sunday, people gathered at a newspaper stand in the Falomo area of Lagos, eager for results to come in and expressing hope the election would bring change.
“Last time, we knew Buhari was going to be re-elected, there was no excitement, but this time is so different, the race is open and there is hope,” mechanic Orubibi Dighobo said.
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