Elections were held in Nigeria on 25 February. The most populous country in Africa, with 213 million inhabitants, was called to the polls to elect a new president to succeed the outgoing Muhammadu Buhari. Three days after election day, however, it is still unclear who the winner is. Partial results from counted polling stations show the ruling party candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the lead, but organisational delays in the vote count have fuelled allegations of fraud from the opposition.

Update of 28 February 2023

Counting delays and opposition challenges

Three days have passed since the Nigerian elections, yet the country still has no new president. The blame lies above all with the organisational delays that have characterised the counting process, triggering no small number of challenges from the opposition over fears of possible fraud. This year's elections made use of a new vote-registration system, which was supposed to allow the nearly 180,000 polling stations scattered across the country to upload electoral results within a short time. Overseeing the entire process, the Independent National Electoral Commission (Inec) had announced that this system would guarantee transparent elections.

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Reality, however, did not live up to expectations: at many polling stations results were collected manually at constituency and local government collation centres, as in previous votes. The outcome was an overall slowdown in operations, as evidenced by the figure released yesterday afternoon by Inec, which had results from just 66,167 electoral units out of a total of 178,846. This triggered protests from the opposition, particularly because the first data showed the ruling party candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the lead. The count of provisional results showed that Tinubu, of the All Progressives Congress, was ahead with 39.7%, equivalent to 5.4 million valid votes, against 32.2%, equivalent to 4.4 million votes, for Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, the main opposition party. Outsider Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party, won in Lagos, the country's wealthiest and most populous city, finishing overall in third place with around 16.3% and approximately 2.2 million votes.

Why the Nigerian elections matter at a global level

Nigeria is considered one of the countries with the greatest growth potential globally, driven largely by profits from the oil industry. According to data from the International Energy Agency (Iea), Nigeria is the world's seventh largest exporter of oil, with 99 million tonnes of crude in 2019. The country therefore rightfully belongs to the so-called Mint, the acronym coined by British economist Jim O'Neill to denote the next giants of the world economy, comprising Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. To put it in context, O'Neill had been the inventor of the term Brics — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — which identified as emerging economies those that today represent some of the largest "slices" of global GDP.

To climb the rankings and fulfil the role attributed to it by analysts, Nigeria will be able to count on younger generations. Like many African countries, it has a particularly encouraging demographic profile, with almost 70 per cent of the population under the age of 30. Many of them identify with the so-called "coconut-head generation" — that is, the most strong-willed and enterprising young people, the "hard heads" convinced they can represent a turning point for their country from an entrepreneurial, social and also political standpoint. Some of this transformative energy has found an outlet in Lagos, the most forward-looking city, where many of the 90 cutting-edge technology hubs recorded on Nigerian soil have sprung up.

The Buhari era comes to an end

The elections in Nigeria mark the end of Muhammadu Buhari's presidency: he has reached the constitutional two-term limit and therefore cannot stand again after eight years at the helm of the African country. Buhari became president in 2015, when he stood in the presidential election as the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, a kind of catch-all party formed two years earlier from the merger of three major Nigerian political forces from different political traditions: the centre-left liberals of the Action Congress of Nigeria, the centre-right social conservatives of the All Nigeria Peoples Party, and the Congress for Progressive Change, a centrist progressive party and already a supporter of Buhari in the past.

But Buhari's history in power had begun well before his first democratic election. He had been the architect of a coup d'état that gave rise to a military junta that governed Nigeria from 1983 to 1985. During those years he had led the government in what the military junta of the time had described as a campaign against the rampant corruption gripping the country. Throughout his presidency, Buhari sought to reclaim and maintain this image as an upright leader, morally unimpeachable and an enemy of corruption — the architect of the War Against Indiscipline launched in 1984, which took aim precisely at the crisis of public morality using militaristic methods, as was in the nature of that regime.

Where the winner of the Nigerian elections picks up from

Over his two terms, Buhari continued to present himself as the providential man who could restore the fortunes of the most populous country in Africa, but things did not go exactly that way. Nigeria's economy began to slow from 2015 onwards, the year in which the wealth of Nigerians started to shrink progressively. Despite a modest upturn in gross domestic product (GDP) being recorded after the country entered full recession around the pandemic period, it cannot be said that this improved conditions for the population.

Between 2015 and 2019, average per capita income had fallen from $5,400 to $4,900. In the meantime, absolute poverty grew: according to the latest estimates, some 71 million people live below the poverty line on less than $1.90 a day, a third of the total population. The oil industry, the country's most important source of wealth, was hit by the collapse in crude prices that occurred during the early years of Buhari's presidency, while the prolonged war in Ukraine has worsened the burden of inflation, which has been rising for years.

On the social and security front the situation is no better. Many still remember the violent government crackdowns against the protest movement known by the hashtag #EndSARS in 2020, which called for the dismantling of Nigeria's special police unit, accused of extreme torture. Adding to the tensions is the great fragmentation of society, made up of more than 250 ethnic groups and divided along confessional lines between a predominantly Christian south and a Muslim north.

The death toll from clashes involving the many internal armed groups linked to criminal organisations or secessionist movements has risen sharply over the years. This context is obviously compounded by the presence of Boko Haram, the jihadist organisation that was founded in Nigeria and owes part of its consolidation to the very interreligious conflict that divides the African state. While Islamist groups are predominantly active in the north-eastern states, episodes of less organised but equally brutal violence are widespread in the north-west too. Secessionist movements organised into paramilitary groups are contributing to fuelling terror in the south. The picture has been worsening as the vote has approached, with around "ten thousand Nigerians killed as a result of violent attacks and five thousand confirmed abductions in 2022," according to the NGO The Africa Center.

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Between the oil crisis and the climate crisis

The issue of the environmental crisis can hardly be relegated to a footnote when we are talking about the largest oil producer in Africa. A primacy that, however, has been under threat since 2020 from a steady decline, culminating in a veritable production collapse last October, as certified by the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission. Nigeria has reached its lowest levels in 32 years, falling to 980,000 barrels per day (in 2011 the figure was 2.1 million) and effectively ceding its leading production position to Angola. At the same time, several kilometres of illegal pipelines have been discovered — unlawful infrastructure often controlled by fully fledged criminal organisations. As well as siphoning off tonnes of hydrocarbons from the overall national production count, they pose a serious threat to entire territories and communities, particularly those of the Niger Delta.

The same region from which, just a few weeks ago, nearly 14,000 claims for compensation were filed for damages caused by the extraction operations of fossil fuel giant Shell. They were brought by citizens, religious organisations and other Nigerian bodies at the High Court in London. In that area, oil spills have literally flooded the banks and bed of the river, compromising ecosystems and the lives of local communities that have been suffering for decades. Furthermore, as with other countries in the eastern part of the continent, Nigeria was swept by the violent floods of last summer, which worsened the country's humanitarian situation, causing more than 600 deaths and displacing over one million people. According to Unicef, around 2.5 million people are in need of assistance, 60 per cent of whom are children.

Who are the candidates in Nigeria's elections

The vote will elect both the president and members of parliament — 109 senators and 360 deputies. In a subsequent round scheduled for March, 31 of the 36 state governors will then be elected. For the presidential office there are 18 candidates, although it seems likely that the ballot will produce a three-way race whose outcome remains rather uncertain.

Let us turn things on their head: first, there is the underdog — the surprise candidate who could compete with the long-serving politicians. In recent weeks, Peter Obi has been widely discussed in the international media. The Labour Party candidate and former governor of the south-eastern state of Anambra could indeed contest the leadership of the country against the established political veterans in Nigeria's upcoming elections. Obi has become popular with under-30 voters for the positions he took during #EndSARS and for repeatedly stressing the need to stem the "brain drain" of the country's young people. In Nigeria, where political disengagement is a constant — reflected in the 35 per cent turnout recorded in 2019 — the question of the youth electorate should not be underestimated, given that nearly 70 per cent of the population is under 30. Obi also personally embodies discontinuity: he is of Igbo ethnicity — the country's third-largest group after the Hausa and Yoruba — and is a Christian, while the other main candidates are Muslim.

The outgoing president's endorsement goes to Bola Ahmed Tinubu, former governor of the wealthy state of Lagos and candidate of the All Progressives Congress, the ruling party. With a managerial background within the ranks of Mobil Oil Nigeria, an oil company controlled by Exxon, Bola Tinubu is well known at home for his contribution to the rise of the city of Lagos — to the point of becoming the subject of a documentary, The Lion of Bourdillon, which in 2015 portrayed him as "the godfather of Lagos" and landed its producers a defamation lawsuit. Lagos is a megalopolis with a modern and extremely weal