Nigeria's Failed Election.

On Saturday (28/3/15) Nigeria attempted to hold it's General Election. Given that Nigeria is effectively in a state of war due to the Boko Haram insurgency in the north of the country I thought this would be the worst possible time to hold an election and the fighting had already caused it to be delayed by 6 weeks. However with the backing of the US amongst others the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) demanded that it be held.

The APC also demanded that an extremely complex voter registration system was introduced for this election. Here in the UK in order to vote you register your name and address with the local council and that is checked off a paper list when you go to cast your vote.

However in order to vote in Nigeria people had to register their biometric data such as fingerprints and iris scans in order to be issued with biometric ID card. At the polling station that ID card is scanned by computer and the biometric data is checked against the prospective voter who have to have their fingerprints etc re-scanned. This biometric system is more complex then the passport/immigration controls at many European nations. If a Republican controlled state in America tried introducing such a system Obama's Democratic party would howl in complaint that it was a racist measure intended to exclude voters and therefore a violation of the cherished Voting Rights of 1965.

To the surprise of absolutely no-one this voter registration has been a disaster with many voters simply not being issued with ID cards ahead of polling day. On polling day itself the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan went to cast his vote in front of all the TV cameras and was embarrassed when the computer failed to recognise him as a registered voter. The President was just the first of many to suffer problems with the computer failing to recognise so many registered voters that voting had to be extended into Sunday (29/3/15).

Since then an alarming picture has begun to emerge of a pro-APC bias amongst the voting problems. The most significant example has been the Abia state which is widely considered to be a stronghold of Jonathan's People's Democratic Party (PDP). At the last election the PDP secured around 3.5 million votes. This time around the APC came a distant second with just 13,000 votes but the PDP only managed to secure fewer then 400,000 votes. In that time the population of Abia has not changed dramatically so the only reasonable conclusion is that some 3.1 million - predominately PDP - voters have been excluded from the election.

So far 33 of Nigeria's 36 states have declared a result and they put Muhammadu Buhari's APC in the lead by roughly 2.7 million which is fewer then the number of voters who appear to have gone missing in Abia. Also under Nigeria's election laws in order to be declared the winner a candidate must secured more the 25% of the vote in two-thirds of all states. It seems extremely unlikely that Buhari has been unable to do this but he has still arbitrarily declared himself the winner.

It seems to me then that Nigeria is on the brink of being dragged back into the dark days of the 1980's when coups and military dictatorships were common. This is of course a time that Buhari is very familiar with. Presumably the US are viewing this as just punishment for Nigeria's refusal to participate in the Rihanna operation.

As such the only way forward seems to be for Nigeria to re-run the vote once the voter registration problems have been resolved. The only other alternative is to wait to see if Buhari will use tanks to back up his APC.

17:00 on 31/3/15 (UK date).