New Nigerian Leader Talks Up Democracy

Despite reports of election fraud, Nigeria’s newly elected president proclaimed Monday that he will build democracy after years of disastrous military rule.

Olusegun Obasanjo, a 61-year-old retired general, was officially declared the winner of Saturday’s balloting. The Independent National Electoral Commission said he captured 63% of the vote to defeat rival Olu Falae and become Nigeria’s first civilian president in 15 years.

Obasanjo ran Nigeria from 1976 to 1979 before voluntarily handing over power to civilian rule.

Surrounded by well-wishers in a hotel room here in the capital, Obasanjo pledged Monday to nurture democracy.

“Election is not the end of democracy,” Obasanjo said. “Election is just one important event in the process, and democracy under my own leadership will continue.”

Obasanjo is scheduled to take office May 29 at the same time that the military regime of Gen. Adulsalami Abubakar steps down.

But Falae, 60, a former finance minister, has charged that the elections were fraudulent. He said Monday that he would decide what action to take once his team had finished gathering detailed reports from across the country. To officially challenge the election, Falae would have to file suit with Nigeria’s Court of Appeal, a process that could take months.

An Abuja-based Western diplomat said that it was not surprising Falae was crying foul but that the number of problems that cropped up in the conduct of the election was a surprise.

U.S. monitors from the Carter Center and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs said they were “greatly concerned” about serious flaws, including inflated vote returns, ballot-box stuffing, altered results and disenfranchisement of voters because too few ballots were delivered too late.

Former President Carter sent a terse letter Monday to electoral commission chief Ephraim Akpata underscoring his group’s position.

“There was a wide disparity between the number of voters observed at the polling stations and the final results that have been reported from several states,” Carter said. “Regrettably, therefore, it is not possible for us to make an accurate judgment about the outcome of the presidential election.”

Local observers were even more harsh, suggesting that in some areas, electoral fraud was great enough to completely distort the election result.

The Transition Monitoring Group, an alliance of human rights and civic organizations, said in a statement that “most disturbing was the extent to which electoral officers colluded across the country in the falsification of results.”

The group blamed both sides and noted that it was “difficult to say the extent to which the efforts of the two parties canceled each other out.”

Observers had indicated Sunday that despite concerns about vote fraud, they were likely to approve the results.