LAGOS, Nigeria
Nigeria's ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu took an early lead in the race for the presidency, according to initial tallies on Monday, after a tight election marked by long delays and an opposition walkout over fraud accusations.
Former Lagos governor Tinubu
faced main opposition party PDP's Atiku Abubakar in Saturday's vote, but Labour
Party's Peter Obi tested the two others as a third contender for the first time
in Nigeria's modern democracy.
Highlighting his challenge to
APC and PDP dominance, Obi won the key state of Lagos, a bastion of Tinubu's
support which also has the largest number of registered voters.
With President Muhammadu
Buhari stepping down, many Nigerians voted with the hope that a new leader will
do a better job tackling insecurity, economic malaise and widening poverty in
Africa's most populous country.
Voting on Saturday was mostly
peaceful, but thugs ransacked some polling stations, many others opened very
late, and delays slowed the uploading of results to an official website meant
to promote transparency.Bola Tinubu
Counting was still ongoing
late Monday, with 14 out of 36 states tallied, but the Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) said Tinubu had won six states, Abubakar five
states and Obi three states.
Tinubu, of the APC party, was
ahead with more than 3.8 million votes, while Abubakar had 3 million and Obi
1.6 million, according to INEC figures.
INEC is expected to resume
announcing results on Tuesday at 1000 GMT.
Candidates must win the most
votes along with 25 percent of ballots in two-thirds of Nigeria's states — a
measure reflecting a country split between a mostly Muslim north and widely
Christian south, and with three main ethnic groups.
Votes for the presidency were
tallied by hand at local polling stations, with results uploaded online to
INEC's central database IReV.
But long delays in voting
getting underway and the slow pace of uploading state-by-state counting fuelled
accusations of manipulation.
PDP and other party agents on
Monday walked out of a counting centre in Abuja.
"We are not here to
rubber stamp the electoral fraud that has been prepared by INEC and APC,"
PDP official Dino Melaye said. "We are saying that INEC is
compromised."
Nigeria has a long history of
vote rigging and ballot buying, though INEC said new technology would help
curtail electoral malpractice.
Labour campaign director Akin
Osuntokun called for INEC to suspend announcing the results because of the
manipulation of tallies.
An EU observer mission said
INEC "lacked efficient planning and transparency during critical
stages" and reduced public trust with delays in voting and results.
Still, the Lagos win by Obi
underscored his surprise challenge to APC and PDP, which have governed Nigeria
between them since the end of military rule in 1999.
Key state
With more than seven million
registered voters, Lagos is a key state. It is also the political home of APC's
Tinubu, who governed Lagos from 1999 to 2007.
INEC said Obi won more than
582,000 votes in Lagos against around 572,000 for Tinubu.
Obi, 61, a former Anambra
State governor, attracted younger voters with a campaign message of change from
his two septuagenarian rivals.
Tinubu, known as the
"Godfather of Lagos" for his influence, accepted defeat and urged his
supporters to remain calm.
"You win some, you lose
some," he said.
In 2019, INEC was forced to
delay the election by a week just hours before voting started. PDP's Abubakar
claimed fraud when Buhari beat him, but the supreme court later tossed out his
claim.
Biometric voter identification
The introduction of biometric
voter identification technology and the IReV central database for results aimed
to counter fraud and make the 2023 vote more transparent.
INEC said Sunday that problems
with uploading results were due to "technical hitches" and there was
no risk of tampering.
Tinubu, a southern Yoruba
Muslim, and Abubakar, a Muslim from the northeast, are long-time political
fixtures who have fought off past corruption accusations. But the emergence of
Obi — a Christian ethnic Igbo from the southeast — threw the race open.
Buhari, a former army general
first elected in 2015, will step down after two terms in office. His critics
say he failed in his key promises to make Nigeria safer.
Whoever replaces him must
quickly get to grips with Africa's largest economy and top oil producer, which
is beset by problems including a grinding jihadist war in the northeast and
double-digit inflation. - AFP
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