Election Fuels Deadly Clashes in Nigeria

Ethnic and religious tensions between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south, discrimination by southerners against immigrants from the north, and frustration over corruption in a country where most subsist on less than $2 a day while top officials have access to billions in oil revenues have set off the latest round of clashes, much as they have in the past.

While more than 300 were killed in Nigeria’s presidential election four years ago, the death toll appeared to be higher this year, as the violence that flared in the wake of the re-election of Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the south, instigated a cycle of action and reaction.

Mobs of Muslim youths in the north began rioting after the defeated opposition candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim from the north, failed to rein in his supporters. That set off a wave of retaliation against Muslims in Kaduna State in the north, according to Shehu Sani, the head of a leading Nigerian civil rights group.

Mr. Sani, who lives in Kaduna, said Sunday that more than 500 people, mostly Muslims, had been killed in three villages in Kaduna alone since the April 16 presidential election. There was no independent verification of the figure; the authorities have been chary of releasing death tolls for fear of inflaming further violence.

Human Rights Watch said that about 140 were killed in political violence between November and April 17, the day after the election, while acknowledging that many more had died since. Mr. Sani said the total number of victims in the recent violence could top 1,000.

“For presidential elections, on this scale, it’s new,” said Chidi Odinkalu of the Open Society Justice Initiative, adding that the only comparable episodes of violence occurred in the mid-1960s and early 1980s, both times leading to the overthrow of incumbent governments.

A researcher for Human Rights Watch said Sunday that one village in Kaduna “looks like a war zone,” with “not one building standing” and a mosque that had been “gutted.” The researcher, Eric Guttschuss, said he had seen a mosque in another village, Marada Rio, that had been burned down, with anti-Islam graffiti scratched into the ruins, next to inscription reading, “Jesus is Lord.” In other villages, entire streets had been burned down, Mr. Guttschuss said.

Sunday was a day of relative calm in the worst-hit areas like Kaduna, as residents observed a curfew, cleared debris, buried their dead and attended Easter services amid a heavy military and police presence. But there were fears that next week’s elections for governors might bring a renewal of the mayhem.

Mr. Odinkalu said that it was “difficult to come up with a single organizing theory” for the violence. But the persistent cleavage between the country’s relatively wealthier, oil-producing south and its impoverished north, fueled by the intermingling of populations and religions, appeared to lie at the base of this episode, as in previous ones.

Riots in the Muslim north followed Mr. Jonathan’s decisive defeat last week of Mr. Buhari, 57 to 31 percent, in a vote that foreign-observer groups said was perhaps Nigeria’s fairest ever. Mr. Buhari, a former military dictator, swept the north, and after his defeat knife- and machete-wielding youths in northern towns like Kano rampaged through the streets, chanting the general’s name and attacking supporters of Mr. Jonathan’s majority party.

Unlike Mr. Jonathan, Mr. Buhari had refused to condemn, in advance, a possible violent reaction to the election result — a silence analysts said nearly amounted to an invitation to his supporters to take to the streets.

Analysts said the rioting reflected, in part, northern frustration that the dominant party did not allocate its slot on the presidential ballot to a northerner, as would have been expected under an unwritten practice of alternating northern and southern rule of the country.

 

Incumbent Reported Leading in Nigeria Vote

Results from a watershed presidential election in Nigeria began to trickle in Sunday after the voting unfolded peacefully the day before — a first for a country with a history of rigged and violent votes in the 12 years since the end of military rule. News reports on Monday said the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, had secured a strong lead, prompting protests by his rival’s supporters in the north of the country.

Votes counted from all but one of Nigeria’s 36 states showed President Jonathan, from the southern oil producing Niger Delta, had beaten Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler from the Muslim north, in the first round, Reuters reported.

Nigerians have never voted before in such favorable conditions, analysts and election monitors said: ballot materials appear to have arrived on time, there were few reports of violence and the registration process before the voting on Saturday appeared to have gone smoothly.

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 his 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.

“It appears to be going quite smoothly,” said the leader of the National Democratic Institute’s observer mission, Joe Clark, a former Canadian prime minister, speaking from the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

“It’s gone in a quite orderly fashion,” he said, as large numbers of voters waited patiently. “Their numbers were called, and they queued up.”

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.

On Saturday, electoral officials were using an uncomplicated procedure for cutting down on fraud, Mr. Clark said. They were asking voters to remain near the polling places. “Their simple presence is supposed to deter what happened before,” he said. “The reason they are staying is to protect their vote.”

Their watchful eyes are credited with deterring fraud and their numbers are seen as preventing intimidation of voters and poll workers. In addition, President Jonathan is considered a credible candidate who is almost certain to be the eventual winner, although he could face a runoff. He has repeatedly called on his supporters to refrain from intimidation and acts of violence. Mr. Jonathan’s main opponent, Mr. Buhari, said Saturday that he would not contest the results of the vote.

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.