One of the three leading contenders in the race for Nigeria’s presidency called Sunday for the election to be re-run after widespread chaos with ballot papers and charges of voter fraud.
“I have already rejected the elections,” Vice President Atiku Abubakar told journalists in the capital, Abuja, referring to the presidential poll and concurrent legislative elections.
“They have no alternative other than to cancel them altogether.”
Saturday’s election to take over from President Olusegun Obasanjo had been touted as a democratic showcase marking the African giant’s first peaceful handover of power from one civilian to another since independence in 1960.
But election delays and ballot-box mayhem, along with violence, marred the poll in Africa’s most populous nation, also the world’s sixth oil exporter.
“What we have seen clearly proves our fears that it is the worst election ever seen,” Abubakar said.
The vice president’s call came shortly after Nigeria’s largest poll monitoring group threatened to call for a re-run of the historic election.
Results were not expected until Monday but, with reports of electoral chaos in a country twice the size of France, the observer body, the Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), said it might also request the cancellation of the poll.
“From all the reports we are getting from the field, these were not credible elections, so it tends to the direction that we will reject the results and ask for new elections to be held,” TMG head Innocent Chukwuma told AFP.
The organisation had 50,000 observers on the ground during the election.
Complaints notably centred on ballot papers failing to be delivered on time to the country’s 120,000 polling stations, with some Nigerians unable to cast their votes at all, and others only late in the day.
And due to printing errors on some of the 65 million ballots, parliamentary and senatorial elections had to be cancelled at the last minute Saturday in parts of the country, including central Lagos.
The electoral havoc was partly caused by a Supreme Court decision this week to allow Abubakar, who is facing corruption allegations, to run in the election, overruling his disqualification by the election commission.
Abubakar, a longtime Obasanjo ally with whom he fell out, is one of the three frontrunners for the presidency. He defected from the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) to run for the opposition Action Congress.
The other leading contenders are Umaru Yar’Adua of the PDP, who is tipped as the likely winner, and former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari of the opposition All Nigeria People’s Party.
Buhari said Saturday that his impression was of a “very disappointing” poll. “There are some states where the election materials were not received.”
In Buhari’s home town, Daura in northern Katsina, youths angered by the lack of ballot papers went on the rampage and burnt down six houses belonging to people close to the PDP.
In Obasanjo’s native town Abeokuta, in the southwest, a PDP parliamentarian accompanied by several armed men thumb-printed numerous ballot papers in the sight of terrified election officers.
“I am not impressed about these elections,” leading lawyer and human rights activist Gani Fawehinmi told AFP.
“If we have to transit for the first time from one civilian government to another, it does not have to be by killing the democratic process through perpetration of violence and engaging in electoral malpractices,” he added.
The opposition daily, The Nation, was unequivocal in its verdict with the front-page headline: “Violence, fraud nationwide”.
In election-related violence Saturday, a truck bomb attack on the offices of the electoral commission in the capital, Abuja, failed just before polling, while seven police heading for election duty were ambushed by unknown gunmen and killed in Nasarawa.
In the oil-rich southern Niger Delta, assailants in speed-boats shot at a military base as troops fanned out across Yenagoa, capital of Bayelsa state, following shootings and bombings the previous night.