Nigerian President re-elected despite EU fraud claims

Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, was declared the winner of Africa's largest election yesterday although his main opponent and international observers complained of "serious irregularities and fraud" in much of the country.

Mr Obasanjo, 66, a former military ruler and retired general, won more than 24 million votes, the electoral agency INEC declared. His biggest rival, the former coup leader Muhammadu Buhari, garnered more than 12 million votes, the agency said.

Mr Buhari warned last week that his supporters might resort to "mass action" if he were defeated in fraudulent elections.

Yesterday, Mr Buhari's All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP) issued a statement saying it would not consider his government legitimate until new elections had been held in 15 of the country's 36 states. "Any government that is formed on the basis of this fraudulent election result will be illegitimate," the statement said.

The declaration of Mr Obasanjo as outright winner for a second time, after he won military-run elections in 1999, was further undermined when international and domestic observers added to the criticism of the way the elections had been run in large parts of the country.

While the official results were still undeclared last night, the United States said that there were "credible claims of electoral malfeasance".

More than 41 million people queued on Saturday in the searing heat to vote in the country's first presidential and governorship elections since military rule ended. In most regions, the voting was peaceful and orderly, the observers said.

But in six of the states won by Mr Obasanjo's People's Democratic Party (PDP), "minimum standards for democratic elections were not met", an EU mission of 107 observers said in a statement. "The elections in these states lack credibility and appropriate measures must be taken by the relevant authorities." Five of the six states named by the EU are in the south-east or southern Delta region, the most corrupt and volatile part of the country. The sixth was Kaduna in northern Nigeria, a city loosely held together by community efforts since riots three years ago, in which 3,000 people were killed. Serious irregularities were observed on a smaller scale in five other states, the EU said.

The criticisms by the largest foreign observer mission matched observations given on Monday by two American observer groups and the two biggest domestic observer missions, which between them had more than 40,000 people working during the elections. All of them reported under-age and multiple voting and direct evidence of ballot-box stuffing and falsification of results in up to one third of states.

Abubakar Siddique, a professor of political sciences at Zaria university in northern Nigeria, said that the fraud observed would have had a greater impact on state elections than in the presidential poll, which Mr Obasanjo would have won anyway. He said that in 10 states where no serious fraud had been declared, the incumbent state governors had been voted out of office as soon as voters were given the chance to vote for change.

In Kano, the biggest city in the north, the victor was Ibrahim Shekarau, a devout Muslim supported by the Islamic clergy in the city after he promised to tighten the enforcement of Islamic law.

Mr Shekarau's victory has already stirred fears of unrest in a city that has a Muslim majority but large Christian and animist minorities opposed to the stricter implementation of the code of law, which was introduced across 12 northern states in January 2000.

Mr Obasanjo has yet to say whether he will consider allowing a re-run of the polls in any of the states where observers have seen the most egregious fraud. The misconduct of Nigeria's only two previous elections run by civilians, in 1964 and 1983, led in both cases to military coups.