Nigeria Election Should be Re-Run, Says Monitoring Group

Violence, intimidation and mismanagement have fatally marred the long-awaited Nigerian elections, robbing the people of their chance to participate in a truly democratic handover of political power. Read a firsthand account of the events to get a true sense of what went on yesterday.

UPDATE: Additional coverage from the M&G:

[q
url="http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/&articleid=305451"]Nigeria's
election was a failure and must be rerun, local observers said on
Sunday, but the government said coup plotters were trying to discredit
the poll.

The vote on Saturday in Africa's most populous nation was marred by
violence, fraud and intimidation. First results on Sunday indicated
continued dominance by the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP), as
was expected.

The election was a far cry from the hoped-for display of democracy
to mark the first handover from one civilian president to another in a
country scarred by decades of military rule.

"We are going to call for a rerun of elections. You cannot use the
result from half of the country to announce a new president," Innocent
Chukwuma, chairperson of biggest local observer group, told Reuters.

But the government said coup plotters were trying to annul the
election to wreck democracy after failing to blow up electoral
headquarters on Saturday with a petrol tanker.

The tanker stopped short and failed to explode.

The plotters "failed to get the international community to label
Nigeria as a failed state and also incite the rank and file of the
Nigerian armed forces with the sole aim of scuttling the presidential
elections", Information Minister Frank Nweke said in a statement.

Government spokesperson Uba Sani accused Senate president Ken
Nnamani of wanting to impose an interim government and incite chaos.

Nnamani dismissed what he called "trumped-up" charges and said he would never support a coup.

Chukwuma, of the Transition Monitoring Group, said the official
electoral commission had not been prepared for Saturday's vote. "In
many parts of the country elections did not start on time or did not
start at all," he said.

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Another NP posting can be found here.