Obasanjo on track for landslide poll victory in Nigeria

Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo, looked on the verge of a landslide victory after weekend elections that saw about half a dozen powerful state governors fall.

Mr Obasanjo, 66, a retired general and former military ruler, had a strong early lead over his main rival, Muhammadu Buhari, a former general and coup leader.

With full or partial results submitted from 15 of 36 states, Mr Obasanjo led with 71.5 per cent while Mr Buhari had 25.4 per cent.

The other 18 candidates in the presidential poll all trailed far behind.

Turn-out was high, officials said. Tens of millions of ordinary Nigerians queued out of doors for hours on Saturday, some suffering in the heat, others pummelled by torrential rain, to vote in their first elections since military rule ended, choosing a new President and state governors.

In the southern Niger Delta region, home to the country's multibillion-pound oil industry, many towns and villages were denied the chance to vote when ballot boxes and papers were snatched by thugs from rival political parties, poll monitors said. The rewards of office in the Niger Delta are higher than anywhere else in Nigeria, with each state government receiving 13 per cent of the oil revenues from its area in addition to normal federal funding.

"The money available to people who control the Delta is what makes the voting there abnormal," said Abubakar Siddique, a political sciences professor in Zaria, northern Nigeria.

But elsewhere, the voting appeared better run than in poorly organised parliamentary polls last weekend, which were won by Mr Obasanjo's Peoples Democratic Party, a loose coalition of businessmen and local politicians.

Festus Okoye, the head of a team of 10,000 independent poll monitors, said: "From the reports we have, it seems the voting was peaceful and orderly in most parts of the country. The real problems were in the Delta and southeast but elsewhere it was actually quite good.

"The real issue now is to know if the politicians who have been rejected by the voters will accept their defeat or try to fight it and we will only know over the next few days."

The first signs were relatively encouraging. In Ogun, Mr Obasanjo's home state in south-west Nigeria, voters turned out massively to put the President back in office and reject the state governor, Segun Osoba, who garnered only half the votes of the candidate of the President's party.

Mr Osoba's Alliance for Democracy party announced it was rejecting the results as a "fraud". It said it would seek a court review and accept the court ruling. Mr Osoba's supporters had threatened violence last week if he was defeated.

Mr Okoye said the way the voters had turned out en masse on Saturday despite a restricted choice of candidates and intimidation showed that, after years of military dictatorships and civilian misrule, the Nigerian people wanted change.

Mr Siddique said: "With all its faults, the political process in Nigeria now is far more open than it has been at any time since the elections in 1979, organised by Mr Obasanjo when he was military ruler," he said.

Under Nigeria's constitution, candidates must win an outright majority – 50 per cent plus one vote, as well as at least a quarter of the votes in 24 or 36 states to ensure a broad national base.