Nigerians awoke on Saturday to find that the country’s presidential election had been delayed until February 23 because of what the electoral commission called unspecified “challenges”.
The top candidates condemned the decision and blamed each other but appealed to Africa’s largest democracy for calm, while they rushed back to the capital, Abuja, to learn more about what went wrong.
Some bitter voters in the capital and elsewhere, who had travelled home to cast their ballots, said they could not afford to wait another seven days. They warned that election apathy could follow.
“Their plan is to provoke the public, hoping for a negative reaction, and then use that as an excuse for further anti-democratic acts,” the party said in a statement. It urged Nigerians to remain calm and turn out in greater numbers a week from now.
Mr Buhari said he was “deeply disappointed” after the electoral commission had “given assurances, day after day and almost hour after hour that they are in complete readiness for the elections. We and all our citizens believed them.”
One ruling party campaign director in Delta state, Goodnews Agbi, told The Associated Press it was better to give the commission time to conduct a credible vote instead of rushing into a sham vote “that the whole world will criticise later.”
Frustrated voters gathered in the capital.
“I came all the way from my home to cast my vote this morning … and then I got informed that the election has been cancelled, so that is the reason why I am not happy, and I’m very, very angry,” voter Yusuf Ibrahim said.
A civic group monitoring the election, the Situation Room, said the delay “has created needless tension and confusion” and called on political parties to avoid incitement and misinformation.
More than 84 million voters in the country with a population of some 190 million had been expected to head to the polls in what is seen as a close and heated race between Mr Buhari and Mr Abubakar, a billionaire former vice president.
When Mr Buhari came to power in 2015 he made history with the first defeat of an incumbent president in an election hailed as one of the most transparent and untroubled ever in Nigeria, which has seen deadly post-vote violence in the past.
