The stability of Africa’s most populous nation is at stake as it concludes voting that began on April 9 with parliamentary elections.
At least 500 people perished in rioting across the country’s predominantly Muslim north when tallies from the April 16 presidential poll showed President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian, had won. Mobs set fire to the hostels where young poll workers were staying, leaving at least 11 recent college graduates dead.
Attahiru Jega, chief of Nigeria’s Independent Election Commission, paid tribute to those who died.
“Some have paid the ultimate price for democracy and I am sure that I speak the minds of all Nigerians if I say that the nation will be eternally grateful to them,” he said.
“One way of immortalizing them is to ensure that we complete the remaining elections successfully and not succumb to the designs of people who want to scuttle our collective aspiration for a strong, united and democratic country.” Some members of Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps vowed to return to duty Tuesday at polling stations as voters choose state leaders who control billions of dollars. Media reports, though, said more than 80 workers already had been evacuated from their posts, while another 350 were awaiting transportation so they too could be evacuated.
“I just left,” said a 25-year-old woman who had been serving in the northern state of Gombe as a poll worker.
“Very few corps members are left in the state because we were not safe.” The one-year service program is mandatory for Nigerians who graduate from college before the age of 30, and rules prohibit them from speaking to the media.
In the country’s oil-rich south, corps members came to voting stations but in Akwa Ibom state they sat without any election materials and there was no visible sign of security.
“It wasn’t like this in the other two elections,” said Thompson Bassey, 47, who works for Nigeria’s Ministry of Defense. “We have not even seen the officials who should be here.” Aid officials estimate that as many as 40,000 people have fled their homes amid postelection violence and retaliatory attacks. It is not clear how many have returned. Nigerians had to be physically present in the neighborhood where they vote before movement restrictions went into effect early Tuesday.
Officials have postponed the governors’ races in the two northern areas hardest hit by violence that erupted after the presidential election — Kaduna and Bauchi states — until Thursday.
In Nigeria’s northeast, an explosion at a hotel killed three people and wounded 14 others in the city of Maiduguri on Sunday, police said. While no one claimed responsibility for that attack, a radical Muslim sect recently vowed to keep fighting there. Another blast went off early Tuesday in the town but no casualties were reported.
Violence also remains likely in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta, a region of swamplands and mangroves about the size of Portugal. Akwa Ibom state, home to many oil fields operated by the Nigerian subsidiary of US oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp., already has seen rioters burn cars and torch a campaign office for Jonathan in recent weeks.
The region remains awash in military-grade assault rifles and weapons from a long-running militancy, though attacks on oil companies dropped after a 2009 government-sponsored amnesty program.
