Turnout Low as Nigerians Choose Leader

By James Rupert, Washington Post, Sunday 28 February 1999; Page A21

Retired army Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, who ruled in the 1970s and handed power back to civilians, is favored to win today's vote, largely because of heavy financial and organizational backing from wealthy, powerful, retired military officers.

Many Nigerians said that they had abstained because they believed a victory for Obasanjo was predetermined. Others said they had voted despite such doubts to underscore their preference for any civilian government rather than a military one.

African and Western governments hope for a credible election result to enhance the legitimacy and stability of the civilian administration that is to take over in 13 weeks. A successful return to civilian rule is seen as essential to arresting economic collapse and political decay in Africa's most populous nation.

Nigeria's importance to African efforts to democratize and develop %G–%@ and its centrality to U.S. policymaking on this continent %G–%@ have prompted numerous U.S. political figures to come here to observe the voting and offer analyses. Former president Jimmy Carter, retired Gen. Colin L. Powell and several members of Congress are members of delegations from the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and other groups.

Nigerian and foreign election observers said a high turnout and a cleaned-up vote count were needed to ensure a credible election today, after what they said was a disturbing level of fraud in last Saturday's legislative election. But Nigerian and foreign journalists in disparate regions reported participation only marginally higher than last Saturday. News agency and broadcast reports told of many polling places with turnout running between 10 and 30 percent, and few spots with as much as 50 percent.

No significant official results were expected before Sunday, but the voting patterns reported tonight reinforced the expectation of a victory for Obasanjo. His People's Democratic Party has taken 50 to 60 percent of the votes in elections since December for local, state and national legislative offices. The only hope for a victory by his opponent, former finance minister Olu Falae, appeared to be a massive turnout in Lagos and other areas dominated by ethnic Yorubas.

That didn't happen. In Ayetoro %G–%@ a slum perched on stilts between a four-lane highway and the marshy edge of Lagos' tidal lagoon %G–%@ the polling place was a rough wooden table in the shade of a pedestrian footbridge. Falae won, 187 to 36, but that represented only 32 percent of registered voters.

Ayetoro shows the worst of what military rule has wrought in Nigeria. Residents said perhaps 20,000 people live in its densely packed wood shacks with corrugated tin roofs.

Men fish or run makeshift sawmills to dress logs floated up the lagoon from forests to the east. But Nigeria's failing electrical grid has been unable to deliver power here for months, silencing the saws. Residents buy their water from private dealers at 10 cents a bucket because there is no public supply.

There was a health clinic a decade ago, but it closed for lack of funds. A government of soldiers will never feel obliged to the people, said Kolawole Ehuwa, 35, a gas company employee, one of few locals to hold a real job with a salary. We must get the soldiers out of politics, he said, voicing one of few points of national political consensus.

But many Nigerians say the military has, one way or another, fixed the current transition to ensure Obasanjo's accession to power. They recall that in Nigeria's last attempt at presidential elections, in 1993, the military government of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida scuttled the vote when tallies showed that Yoruba businessman Moshood Abiola was defeating the military's preferred candidate.

And Obasanjo's campaign has gotten its money and organizational support from his fellow former officers, including Babangida %G–%@ deepening a popular perception that the fix is in. I have no confidence that this vote will be fair, said Ehuwa. While some had opted not to vote, I think we must vote to give Falae a big advantage here because the Obasanjo people will cheat elsewhere, he said.

Journalists reported ballot-box stuffing, notably in the Niger River Delta, an area where the National Democratic Institute and the Atlanta-based Carter Center reported blatant fraud last week. A BBC correspondent reported on polling places north of Port Harcourt where 100 percent of voters had been recorded as participating, with every ballot folded the same way and marked for Obasanjo.

Nigerian officials said they arrested members of Obasanjo's party with ballot boxes of fraudulent votes in the central city of Jos.

Nigerian and foreign monitoring groups have said they plan to issue analyses early next week of the credibility of the vote, including questions of fraud.

During the early morning, voters arrived to have their registration cards checked %G–%@ and about midday, they lined up again to receive ballots and ink them with their thumbprints. Other traffic was banned during voting hours, and Lagos was eerily still.

At Ayetoro, the voting broke a number of the rules. Voters marked their ballots in the open, on a wooden table %G–%@ and some Obasanjo voters nervously tried to fold their ballots to hide their choices from a dozen or so young Falae backers who looked on.

Despite a ban on campaign materials at the polls, Falae backers had put up their posters near the ballot box. When Obasanjo supporters put up their own sign, young men tussled in a noisy shoving match around the table.

Toyin Aribaba, a high school home economics teacher %G–%@ and one of only two election workers running the polling place %G–%@ hunkered nervously on her bench. Her father had urged her not to accept an assignment in such a rough neighborhood, she said later, and for a moment the warning seemed justified.

But soon after the vote started, a van of policemen bounced to a halt on the rutted dirt road, and the young toughs melted away. We came on information that some of these boys might disturb things, the policemen's senior officer said. I am giving you a husband, he told Aribaba, ordering a beefy officer to sit near her at the table and keep order.

The senior officer ripped down the newly installed Falae and Obasanjo signs. Then he gazed toward the voting table, where dozens more posters for Falae hung from a bridge pillar. They had been hanging there for weeks, and were too high to tear down easily, so he declared them legal.

Despite the glitches, no one seemed seriously intimidated in voting for the less popular Obasanjo %G–%@ and by 2:30 p.m., when the ballots were counted, the young backers of both candidates sat scrunched together, drinking beer and arguing.