Protests in North as Nigerian Incumbent Leads in Vote Tally
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Amid violent protests from his main opponent’s supporters, the incumbent Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, appeared set for an easy election victory after a weekend poll judged by analysts to be perhaps the country’s fairest ever.
Mr. Jonathan, a mild-mannered former vice president and zoologist, was leading his opponent, the former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, by over 10 million votes, or around two-to-one, according to a leading civil-society group which based its analysis on results from the country’s top electoral body.
While analysts applauded an absence of the kind of fraud, ballot stealing and violence that have plagued elections since the country’s return to democracy 12 years ago, Saturday’s vote was darkened by what has happened since.
In the northern city of Kano, thousands of youths carrying blades, daggers and sticks marched through the streets on Monday, setting bonfires, tearing down billboards belonging to Mr. Jonathan’s party and burning the house of the former speaker of the lower house of the Nigerian parliament. They shouted, “Only Buhari!”
Mr. Buhari, whose mid-1980s military regime was noted for its stern repression of dissent, was refusing to accept the result Monday afternoon, and his supporters had taken to the streets in northern Nigerian cities to protest, set alight tires and burn down buildings and houses linked to Mr. Jonathan’s ruling People’s Democratic Party.
The results split along regional, religious and ethnic lines, with Mr. Jonathan scoring big totals in the largely Christian south and southwest, and Mr. Buhari leading in the Muslim north of Nigeria.
In Kaduna, there were numerous deaths, and mosques, churches and houses of PDP members were burned down. A police station was also attacked, said Shehu Sani, a leading Nigerian human rights activist who lives there and whose organization has representatives all over the city. He said the electoral commission headquarters in Kaduna had also been burned down by a pro-Buhari mob.
“They are moving street by street, house by house, looking for ruling party members,” Mr. Sani said. “I am holed up in the house here. I can see the smoke, and I can hear the gunfire. There is a state of confusion everywhere,” Mr. Sani said.
Even before the outbreak of Monday’s violence, analysts had warned that Mr. Buhari’s campaign — unlike Mr. Jonathan’s — had not done enough to distance itself in advance from the endemic violence that has plagued every Nigerian election since the return to democratic rule in 1999.
“He has been asked to condemn violence, and he has not,” said a western diplomat in Abuja, of Mr. Buhari. “He is saying, ‘We don’t trust the system, take the system in your own hands.’”
Despite the outbursts of violence on Monday, the implications of the clean vote, for a new democracy still struggling to establish itself after years of dictatorship, are big. Analysts noted that the winner would most likely have a legitimacy denied to predecessors elected under murky circumstances, including ballot stealing, a fraudulent polling list and the violent intimidation of voters, all features of the last presidential election, the widely denounced 2007 vote.
None of those flaws appeared to be a significant part of the electoral landscape on Saturday.
Compared with earlier years, relatively few people, about 39, were killed in pre-election violence, according to the Election Situation Room, a Nigerian civil society group. There have been several bomb blasts as well, notably in the north, home to a militant Islamic sect. But the systematic manipulation that plagued previous elections appeared to be absent, experts said.
Nigeria, which is America’s fourth biggest supplier of crude oil, Africa’s most populous country and home to major investments by American energy companies, is considered by the United States to be “one of the two most important countries in sub-Saharan Africa,” Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson said in a conference call with reporters from Nigeria and elsewhere last month. The other major country usually cited is South Africa.
This year’s election was being closely watched by American officials because, despite shaking off military rule in 1999, Nigeria has maintained an ambiguous, less-than-democratic status, undermined by large-scale corruption, fraud and an elections agency that appeared to increase rather than combat those flaws.
Even more than the outcome, with Mr. Jonathan’s victory largely assumed, the process has been under scrutiny. Already, with Mr. Jonathan’s appointment of a respected political scientist, Attahiru Jega, last year to run the Independent National Electoral Commission, a will to reform appeared evident. Mr. Jega has received high marks for the expeditious cleaning of a voter list that included thousands of illegitimate names — of dead people and celebrities — using a computer registration system deployed at thousands of polling places in the vast country of 150 million, and taking electronic fingerprints of every voter.
Already, before Saturday’s vote, the parliamentary elections last week were “peaceful and credible in most parts of the country,” said Peter Lewis, a Nigeria expert at Johns Hopkins University. “This is the first poll they’ve had under a civilian administration where they’ve had a reasonable degree of organization,” Mr. Lewis said.
Nigerian analysts concurred. “At this stage we’re satisfied so far,” said Clement Nwankwo, the executive director of the Policy and Legal Advocacy Center in Abuja. “For a lot of Nigerians it was really a relief to see the elections go as peacefully as they did last Saturday.”
