Nigeria has announced some early results from Sunday’s national elections, although a winner in the race to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari is not expected for several days.
Voting in Africa’s most populous nation took place mostly peacefully, despite some polling stations being ransacked and many others starting late.
Nearly 90 million people were eligible to vote on Saturday for a successor to Buhari, and many Nigerians hope a new leader will do a better job of tackling insecurity, economic malaise and growing poverty.
Votes in the presidential and parliamentary elections are collated in each of Nigeria’s 36 states before the tally is transmitted to the electoral commission’s central computing center in the capital, Abuja.
The first results, from Ekiki state, showed a majority of votes for president cast in favor of Bola Tinubu from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
Tinubu won more than 200,000 votes in the state, against less than half that total for Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and just over 11,000 for Peter Obi of the Labor Party.
The chairman of the Nigerian electoral commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, adjourned the session after the first results and said that the publication of the tallies would resume at 11:00 local time (10:00 GMT) on Monday.
Voting had to be extended until Sunday in some parts of the country after technical glitches on Saturday, but counting has been underway since polls closed, with the final tally expected in five days.
It was not yet clear if all voting had been completed in the West African oil-exporting country.
Earlier on Sunday, the PDP’s Abubakar had urged INEC to upload the results immediately after accusing some state governors of trying to compromise the results.
“It will be a disservice to Nigerians and a denial of democracy for anyone to subvert the will of the people freely expressed in their votes yesterday,” he said in a statement.
When he was defeated by Buhari in the 2019 election, Abubakar alleged gross fraud. The Supreme Court ultimately dismissed his challenge.
Labor Party Chairman Julius Abure also accused election officials of not uploading results from parts of Lagos and southern Delta state to help the ruling APC’s candidate.
The Yiaga Africa observer group said it was “deeply concerned by the delay” in the results.
But INEC said that the problems with the results loading on its IReV data page were due to “technical problems” and that there was no risk of manipulation.
“The commission wishes to reassure Nigerians that the challenges are not due to any intrusion into or sabotage of our systems,” it said in a statement.
“It is important to avoid statements and actions that could heat up politics at this time.”
Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom, reporting from Abuja, said delays in uploading preliminary results by the electoral commission caused “a lot of consternation” among political parties, candidates and voters.
According to his statement, the “election commission is concerned,” Jamjoom said.
“They want to reassure the citizens that there is no embezzlement at play here, that this is just a glitch. But I’ll tell you, the longer people wait here, the more we’re hearing from people in Abuja who are worried about what all this means and how the delay could affect things in the future of the country.
“People are tense, they want to get those results, they want to know who will be the next leader of this country at such a crucial time.”
The commission has 14 days to officially announce the results, but the online tally should be available in the next few days.
To win the presidency, a candidate must win the most votes but also win at least 25 percent of the votes cast in two-thirds of Nigeria’s 36 states.
Some states are required. Lagos has the largest number of registered voters with more than 7 million, followed by two states in the majority Muslim north of the country, Kano and Kaduna states.
The competitive race has some analysts forecasting an unprecedented runoff between the two leading candidates if neither candidate meets the electoral requirements. It would have to be organized in 21 days.
