Millions vote in Nigeria elections hit by Islamist attacks and technology issues

The long-awaited election in the continent’s biggest democracy, with 60 million potential voters, did not descend into the chaos or violence that the doomsayers had predicted, but it was hardly plain sailing. From the moment that President Goodluck Jonathan himself was rejected by a malfunctioning voter registration machine there were glitches until, by late afternoon, beleaguered officials had been forced to announce that polling in some areas would spill over into a second day.

In the embattled north-east, the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram carried out its threat to disrupt polling day. Fourteen were killed, including an opposition politician, in three separate raids on polling stations. 

“We could hear the gunmen shouting: ‘Didn’t we warn you about staying away from [the] election?’” one official told Agence France-Presse after three died in Gombe state. “They set fire to all the election materials we abandoned as we escaped.”

Residents of the town of Miringa say Boko Haram militants torched people’s homes early Saturday and then shot them as they tried to escape. Twenty-five reportedly died.

Abubakar Shekau, warned in a video message last month: “This election will not be held even if we are dead. Even if we are not alive, Allah will not allow you to do it.”

But many voters in Boko Haram’s heartland defied the threat. Volunteers swept voters with handheld metal detectors in Maiduguri as a precaution after a string of suicide attacks in recent weeks. At a school in Yola, Abbas Mohammed, a university lecturer, cast his vote in one of the centres set up especially for the 1.5 million people displaced by the violence. “If we don’t vote, it will be as if Boko Haram has battered us twice,” he said.