Posted by by Helen Vesperini, AFP on
Nigeria's president-elect Umaru Yar'Adua on Tuesday is facing growing discontent after being declared the winner of a disputed poll which even the outgoing head of state admitted was far from perfect.
LAGOS (AFP) - Nigeria's president-elect Umaru Yar'Adua on Tuesday is facing growing discontent after being declared the winner of a disputed poll which even the outgoing head of state admitted was far from perfect.
In his first press briefing late Monday, Yar'Adua issued an appeal for national unity, amid opposition threats to challenge his victory in court and sharp criticism of the election from foreign and domestic monitors.
"The contest has come and gone, so must our differences in the interest of the greater good," said the leader-to-be of the world's sixth largest oil-exporting nation.
But there were harsh words in Nigeria's morning newspapers.
"We have been the laughing stock among world commentators," wrote the respected independent daily The Nation. "This is not the kind of Nigeria we dreamed of when many dueled with life, career, resources for a democracy."
"Even a goat would have won the elections provided it had the backing of the PDP (ruling People's Democratic Party)," said the private daily The Vanguard.
Yar'Adua, 55, a mild-mannered governor of one of Nigeria's northern Sharia law states, was handpicked by mentor President Olusegun Obasanjo and his ruling party.
The national election commission said Yar'Adua won Saturday's ballot with 24.6 million votes, well ahead of his two main rivals.
There were no turnout figures from the electoral commission but AFP calculations on the basis of commission figures showed Yar'Adua had picked up 57.5 percent of the vote.
Foreign observers slammed the credibility of the poll that -- along with state elections the week before -- claimed at least 200 lives, and opposition parties rejected the result.
"The just-ended elections in Nigeria, while they produced a new government, also produced a highly questionable democracy," Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, an analyst with the New York-based Eurasia group, told AFP.
Heralded as a showcase election marking the first civilian-to-civilian handover of power since independence in 1960 in violence-prone Nigeria, the vote was marred by fraud, electoral delays and political thuggery.
The country's largest observer group demanded the annulment of the vote and described the election as "a charade" set up in a deal rigged by the government and the national election commission.
"We call on the international community not to recognise these discredited elections and not to confer legitimacy on any government that emerges there from," Innocent Chukwuma, head of the Nigerian monitors, said.
The United States and Britain were "deeply troubled" by the violence and voting irregularities and the European Union said the vote was "not credible" and fell short of international democratic standards.
Even Obasanjo admitted the polls had been far from perfect and called on the country to do better next time.
Seeking a way forward, the president urged voters and parties to take complaints to the courts and called on the electoral commission and the judiciary to put wrongs right within the next five weeks before he steps down on May 29.
"After all, in another four years, there will be an opportunity for a fresh contest which I hope will take care of ballot paper and ballot box malpractices," he said.
Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, in Nigeria as the head of an observer team, said the handling of the election had marked "a step backward," but hoped frustrations would be resolved peacefully.
"There is a delicate five weeks period where everything should go properly," Albright said.
Yar'Adua has a track record of financial prudence, public service and accountability and is among the few governors recently absolved of corruption by the country's anti-graft agency.
On being elected governor of Katsina in 1999, Yar'Adua immediately made public his assets.
He has promised to tackle corruption, a major issue in a country regularly ranked among the most corrupt by global watchdog Transparency International.
Turnout appeared low for Saturday's presidential and legislative elections after ballot papers printed at the last minute arrived hours late, or not at all, in many of the 120,000 voting stations of Africa's most populous nation.