Lagos (EFE).- Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa and its main oil producer, will elect its next president today in its seventh general elections since the restoration of democracy in 1999, amid growing discontent over insecurity and economic inequality.
Slightly more than 93.4 million registered voters are called to choose the replacement for the outgoing president, Muhammadu Buhari, who is not seeking re-election because he is running out of the second consecutive four-year term allowed by the Constitution.
These are the keys to follow the elections:
The main presidential candidates
Eighteen candidates are in the presidential race, but only three have a realistic chance of winning, according to polls: Bola Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi.
Tinubu, 70, a candidate for the government’s All Progressives Congress (APC), has been at the center of an intense electoral campaign to regain his party’s popularity, deteriorated by growing insecurity, high unemployment rates, especially among young people, or economic inequality.
For his part, Abubakar, 76 years old and a candidate for the first opposition force, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP), is an experienced politician who became vice president (1999-2007) and is running for the sixth time Presidency.
The youngest of the three is Obi, a 61-year-old renowned businessman and leader of the Labor Party, who describes himself as an alternative to the two-party system that has dominated national politics since 1999.
Requirements to win the presidential elections
The next president of Nigeria must win, apart from a majority of the votes, more than a quarter of the votes cast in at least two thirds of the country’s 36 states.
If no candidate meets these conditions, the elections will be repeated within 21 days with the two applicants who have garnered the most votes.
Insecurity and economic inequality, major electoral issues
Insecurity worries many Nigerians. Jihadist violence has been a major challenge for Buhari’s government, which came to power in 2015 when the jihadist group Boko Haram controlled a territory in northeastern Nigeria the size of Belgium.
Since 2015, Boko Haram and its splinter group, the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP), have lost much territory to the Nigerian military, but remain active.
Similarly, the central and northwestern states of Nigeria are constantly under attack by “bandits”, a term used for criminal gangs that commit mass robberies, robberies and kidnappings for lucrative ransoms.
Added to this problem is galloping inflation and persistent social inequalities in the country, where four out of ten people live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank.
Innovations to prevent electoral manipulation
Nigeria will use for the first time in general elections innovations such as biometric recognition of voters or the electronic transmission of the results of the polling stations.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) assures that this new system will prevent the manipulation of the results, but regrets that the sanctions against politicians who try to buy votes are still “too weak”.
What else is voting today?
Nigerians also elect the legislators of the National Assembly: 109 members of the Senate (Upper House) and 360 members of the House of Representatives (Lower House).