Buhari Triumphs in Nigeria Election as Opposition Rejects Result

LAGOS (Capital Markets in Africa) – Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari easily won a second term as president of Africa’s biggest oil producer with promises to revive an anemic economy and tackle security threats including a devastating insurgency by Islamic State. His main opponent rejected the results.

Atiku Abubakar said Wednesday he’ll go to court to challenge official results showing Buhari won the Feb. 23 ballot by a margin of 56 percent to 41 percent. He alleged the ruling party used the military to harass people in his strongholds and inflate voting numbers in its own.

“If I had lost in a free and fair election, I would have called the victor within seconds,” Abubakar, 72, said in a statement. “However, in my democratic struggles for the past three decades, I have never seen our democracy so debased.”

The legal fight may be complicated by Buhari’s suspension of Chief Justice Walter Onnoghen in late January, ostensibly because of corruption allegations. The U.S. and European Union criticized the move, while the Nigerian Bar Association said Buhari was trying to put someone compliant at the top of the Supreme Court in the event of a post-election dispute over the results.

Observer Criticism
The president’s re-election will also be tainted by criticism of the balloting by foreign and domestic observers and violence that claimed 39 lives. The vote was dramatically delayed by a week hours before polls were meant to open Feb. 16, in what the opposition said was an attempt by the government to ensure low turnout. The Independent National Electoral Commission said 36 percent of those registered cast their vote.

Four years ago, Buhari became the first opposition figure in the nation’s history to win power in what Barack Obama called a “historic step for Nigeria and Africa.” Turnout then was about 45 percent.

“The jury is still out on whether vote rigging in its various forms was decisive in swinging the vote in favor of Buhari,” said Malte Liewerscheidt, an analyst at New York-based Teneo Intelligence. “However, the preliminary evidence strongly suggests a deterioration in the quality of the electoral process compared to 2015.”

Simmering Divisions
Buhari, a 76-year-old former general, will have to contend with a youthful and booming population angry over a lack of jobs and education opportunities and simmering ethnic and religious divisions. Nigeria now has 87 million extremely poor people, more than any other nation, according to the Washington-based Brookings Institution. The United Nations expects its population to double to 410 million by 2050, overtaking everywhere bar India and China.

“What we should be focused on at this point is how to heal the country, how to merge the widening divide that this election has actually brought,” said Idayat Hassan, director at the Centre for Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.

Buhari’s decisive triumph confounded analysts who expected a tight vote and critics who nicknamed him “Baba Go-Slow” in reference to what appeared to be sluggish responses to crises and his health problems. He spent more than five months in 2017 receiving medical treatment in the U.K. for an undisclosed ailment.

Strong State
While Abubakar, a pro-market multimillionaire, said he would float the national currency and sell stakes in the nation’s oil company, Buhari believes in a strong role for the state and retaining government control of large swathes of industry. He’s pledged to boost public spending on road and rail projects.

A Buhari victory means “more political interference in Nigeria’s economy and slower growth,” Mark Bohlund, an economist at Bloomberg Intelligence in London, said in a note Tuesday before the final results were announced. A win for Abubakar would have meant “greater capital investment and a boost to economic growth over the medium-term,” he said.

The stock market fell 0.4 percent by 12:41 p.m. in Lagos, extending its two-day drop to 1.1 percent. Wall Street banks including Citigroup Inc. had predicted a market rally if Abubakar won.

Buhari and his All Progressives Congress party have faced sharp criticism for their handling of the economy. Nigerian equities are the world’s worst-performers since Buhari came to office in May 2015, losing almost half their value in dollar terms.

Capital Controls
Many foreign investors fled after the president tried to protect the naira amid plunging revenue from oil, the country’s main export, by tightening capital controls. After a contraction in 2016, the economy expanded 1.9 percent last year, the fastest since Buhari’s first election in 2015. That’s still low by recent standards — growth averaged 7.7 percent in the first 15 years of this century.

It took him almost six months to present his first cabinet and the budget was repeatedly passed after months-long delays, in part due to tensions between the presidency and the legislature. Senate President Bukola Saraki, an opposition politician and one of Buhari’s main adversaries, lost his seat.

Buhari has a reputation for honesty and the war against graft was one of his key campaign pledges in 2015 as well as this time around. While he has succeeded in stamping out some of the corruption that’s long blighted Nigeria, Transparency International says his efforts have not yielded the desired results. The nation ranks 144 out of 180 countries on the watchdog’s 2018 corruption perceptions index.

Illegitimate Money
“The belief that Buhari has a leadership agenda to block the grab of illegitimate money by politicians helped him get the votes,” said Habu Mohammed, the head of the political science department at Bayero University in Kano.

Buhari and his vice president, Yemi Osinbajo, re-elected on the same ticket, will have to deal with widespread violence in the northeast, where Islamist insurgents, some affiliated to Islamic State, have been fighting to impose their version of Shariah law. The conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and forced more than 2.5 million people in the Lake Chad region to flee their homes.

Separate clashes between farmers and herders over grazing land led to about 2,000 deaths last year, according to Amnesty International.

Source: Bloomberg Business News