Nigeria began today at six in the afternoon, hours late, the recount of votes for the most closely fought general election in recent history, after a day of massive technical failures that generated long queues and prevented thousands of citizens from participating. The chaos was of such a caliber that at the closing time of some polling stations the identification machines that allowed access to the polls had not yet arrived, so the vote had to be left for today.
Due to these and other irregularities, the Labor Party has announced that it will appeal the result to the courts. Its candidate, Peter Obi, has stormed the campaign hard due to youth support and is threatening to break the dominance of the two main Nigerian parties, the All Progressives Party (APP), to which the current president, Muhammadu, belongs. Buhari, and the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP). The first is represented on this occasion by the former governor of Lagos Bola Tinubu and the second by the former president Atiku Abubakar.
Obi has generated enthusiasm among a youth that demands a turning point in the face of growing insecurity and poverty in the country, the most populous in Africa and the main oil producer. But his party believes that the results will be rigged. The party’s general secretary denounced that the formation had significant support in most of the northern region of the country, but voters were prevented from participating, who were “violently persecuted” and expelled from polling stations. In other cases, ballots or ballot boxes have been destroyed, according to a statement.
Another of his complaints is that the staff of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CNEI) did not arrive at the centers or did so very late “to frustrate party supporters, who were exhausted from waiting.”
To finish entangling things, suspected terrorists from the jihadist armed group Boko Haram stormed the city of Goza on Saturday, injuring at least five people.