Nigeria’s President Wins Re-Election

DAKAR, Senegal — Amid violent protests from his main opponent’s supporters, President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria was re-elected 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 who is an anomaly in Nigeria’s tough-guy political world, easily beat his main challenger, the former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission said late Monday.

While analysts applauded an election largely free of the fraud, ballot-stealing and violence that have plagued elections since the country’s return to democracy 12 years ago, the mostly clean vote on Saturday was clouded by what has happened since then.

Voting 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. Mr. Buhari, whose mid-1980s military government 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, setting alight tires and burning down buildings and houses linked to Mr. Jonathan’s governing People’s Democratic Party.

In Kano, thousands of youths carrying cutlasses, daggers and sticks marched through the streets, setting bonfires, tearing down P.D.P. billboards and burning the house of the former speaker of the lower house of the Nigerian Parliament. They shouted “Only Buhari!” as they marched toward the government’s central administration building. The streets of Kano, a city of over three million, were deserted Monday as schools, businesses and government offices shut down.

In Kaduna, there were numerous deaths, and mosques, churches and houses of P.D.P. members were burned down and a police station was 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.”

Even before the outbreak of violence on Monday, analysts had warned that Mr. Buhari’s campaign, unlike Mr. Jonathan’s, had not done enough to distance itself 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,” a Western diplomat in Abuja, the capital, said of Mr. Buhari’s posture during the campaign. “He is saying, ‘We don’t trust the system; take the system in your own hands.’?”

A police spokesman in Kaduna, Aminu Lawan, said that a curfew had been instituted and that “we are on top of the situation.”

Mr. Sani said that more than 40 people had been killed in the city. Mr. Lawan declined to confirm any deaths, and the figure could not be independently verified.

The anger underlying Monday’s outburst in Kaduna was not a surprise to some veteran participants in the country’s political life. Nigeria’s grinding poverty and vast disparities in wealth regularly lead to these types of social breakdowns, they said.

“Nobody expected the election to be free, fair and peaceful, because the conditions for that don’t exist,” said Balarabe Musa, a former governor of Kaduna and a frequent critic of Nigeria’s ruling elite. “The condition whereby people can exercise their fundamental rights can’t exist where there is so much poverty, marginalization and the arrogance of power.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reporting from Kano, Nigeria.