Nigeria’s president is preparing to give an acceptance speech after results from around the country showed his chief rival in Saturday’s election could no longer catch up.
Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) was in the lead by 3.5million votes on Tuesday evening, after the votes in 27 of Nigeria’s 36 states had been counted. To win in the first round, the victor must get at least a quarter of the votes in two thirds of the states, plus an overall majority, and Buhari appeared to have won enough to avoid a runoff.
But the opposition People’s Democratic party (PDP) rejected the result and threatened to take legal action, saying that the ruling All Progressives’ Congress had manipulated the vote.
Babatunde Fashola, a minister and the campaign director for election monitoring, told the Associated Press that they were preparing for the president to give his acceptance speech and celebrate. Dozens of supporters began dancing outside party headquarters in Abuja.
He said the PDP candidate, Atiku Abubakar, should accept his loss gracefully and provide evidence to back up claims that the ruling party manipulated the results of Saturday’s vote.
The election was delayed at the last minute by a week and, since it was held, 47 people have been killed, according to the monitoring organisation the Situation Room.
Reports of vote-buying, multiple failures with the card readers supposed to accredit voters and extremist attacks in the north east marred the eldction. Many polling stations opened late and, in some, voting continued on Sunday.
Shortly before the election, Buhari suspended the chief justice Walter Onnoghen, who heads the supreme court and would have ruled on any dispute over the results. The president’s move was widely criticised as a “some electoral advantage” in the case of a legal challenge.
Buhari and Atiku – the latter is known by his first name – are both northern Muslims in their 70s who have long been in politics. Buhari is seen by many as a strict, inflexible but personally incorruptible figure, while many hoped Atiku, a wealthy businessman and former vice-president, would enact policies to help boost Nigeria’s struggling economy.
Buhari’s popularity dropped over the course of his term, because of his perceived inability to deal fairly with government corruption – he was accused of largely targeting his opponents for prosecutions – and his failure to deal with the many threats facing Nigerians. The north-east region is especially dangerous, because Boko Haram and its offshoot Islamic State West Africa Province still wield considerable might.
It would be unusual for a presidential election to be won by a candidate not backed by a poserful cabal of former generals that includes former presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida.
Buhari narrowly won Lagos, where only 1.1 million of an estimated 20 million residents voted, as well as the pivotal state of Kano, despite the fact that its powerful ex-governor Rabiu Kwankwaso switched from Buhari’s APC to the PDP last year.
- The Guardian