• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Atiku vows to challenge Buhari in court, says Nigeria on a bitter post election future

Atiku hails Supreme  Court judgement on Zamfara Guber

Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari 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 war against insurgents loyal to Islamic State. Now his main opponent had rejected the results and vowed a legal challenge.

The defeated rival, Atiku Abubakar, on Wednesday said he will go to court to contest Independent National Electoral Commission results showing a 56 percent to 41 percent victory for Buhari and called the vote a “sham.”

In a 17-page document sent out Wednesday morning, Atiku said he would have conceded defeat and help to build a better Nigeria had the polls been free, fair and credible and not marred by the level of violence, thuggery and outright vote rigging that he said was even witnessed by local and international observers.

Bloomberg reports that the president’s re-election will also be tainted by criticism of the balloting by domestic and international observers and violence that claimed 39 lives.

Buhari faces a divided nation, with an increasingly youthful population angry over the lack of jobs and education opportunities, with ethnic and religious divisions often close to the boil.

Nigeria now has 87 million extremely poor people, more than any other nation, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. 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.

Abubakar’s statement showed that controversy over the vote would continue.

“It is clear that there were manifest and premeditated malpractices in many states which negate the results announced,” Abubakar, 72, said in his statement. Voting was disrupted and suppressed in his strongholds and the military intimidated voters in other areas, he said.

Buhari’s triumph marks a remarkable turnaround for a 76-year-old former general who his critics nicknamed “Baba Go-Slow” in reference to what appeared to be his sluggish and incoherent response 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.

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 0.7 percent Tuesday, the most in a week, as investors took in a Buhari victory.

Buhari and his All Progressives Congress party have faced sharp criticism for their handling of the economy during his first four-year term.

The president imposed capital controls soon after coming to office as the naira currency came under pressure amid plunging revenue from oil, the country’s main export, and foreign investors fled. After a contraction in 2016, the economy expanded 1.9 percent last year, the fastest since Buhari’s first election, in 2015.