Voter fury over election abuses in Nigeria’s southern Delta state risks aggravating chronic violence that has badly disrupted oil production, residents and opposition leaders said on Monday.
People in most parts of the dilapidated oil city of Warri were unable to vote for a new governor and state assembly on Saturday because of lack of polling stations, residents said.
A day later the electoral body announced that the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) had won the state.
The news caused panic in the city, which has a history of inter-ethnic fighting, as young men with guns and machetes blocked roads and sped through the streets in vehicles.
The city was calm on Monday, but residents said violence would escalate unless a proper election was held.
“This is going to cause much more anarchy. All kinds of disasters can happen unless they cancel the fake result. We are ready to go to any length,” said Festus Owei, a young motorboat driver based in the Miller Waterside docklands.
As he spoke, a crowd of young men gathered, showing their voters’ cards and protesting that they had been disenfranchised.
“There will be war in this state! The PDP will have a war!” they shouted.
At Udu, on the outskirts of Warri, youths attacked the house of a prominent PDP supporter on polling day.
The palatial house was smashed and burned. The blackened carcasses of six cars littered the car park while ash and debris fluttered over the swimming pool and tennis court. Witnesses said at least four people were killed.
OIL
Delta is one of four major oil-producing states in the region, where roughly 2.4 million barrels are pumped every day, making Nigeria the eighth-biggest oil exporter in the world.
Delta and other oil states receive a share of government revenues from crude exports and with the rise of oil prices in the past four years, their revenue has ballooned.
But the majority of people, especially those living in villages only accessible through a maze of creeks, are mired in poverty with no clean water, electricity or job prospects.
This has spawned a generation of angry young men, easy recruits for militant and criminal gangs who attack oil facilities, kidnap foreign oil workers for money and steal crude oil from pipelines.
In Delta, a wave of attacks in February 2006 forced Royal Dutch Shell to shut down oilfields that were previously pumping 500,000 barrels per day.
Shell has been negotiating with local communities and militant groups to re-open the fields and many in Warri said a stolen election would make its task more difficult.
“You can’t impose a candidate on the people and expect them to take it lying down,” said Great Ogboru, who was the main opposition candidate for governor.
“Restiveness is likely to increase, ethnic violence can start again and this can escalate to issues such as hostage- taking, militancy and disruption of oil production.”
Delta is particularly volatile because of underlying tensions between the Urhobo, Itsekiri and Ijaw ethnic groups that in 2003 broke out into weeks of fighting, killing scores of people and shutting down a third of Nigerian oil output.