Abuja // Problems with new technology on Saturday forced a 24-hour extension to Nigeria’s presidential election as renewed Boko Haram violence hit the knife-edge vote.
The militants are suspected of killing seven in separate attacks in north-eastern Gombe state, including at polling stations, while on Friday, 23 people were beheaded in Borno.
President Goodluck Jonathan was the most high-profile victim of the glitches with handheld readers, which scan biometric identity cards to authenticate voters.
Mr Jonathan, 57, seeking a second term, was forced to abandon his attempt to be accredited to vote in his home town of Otuoke, Bayelsa state, after the device failed repeatedly.
He was then accredited by hand and later voted but said afterwards: “As head of state, I don’t blame anybody ... I think the problem is national.”
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) admitted there had been “challenges” with the technology in many places that forced polling officials to suspend the process.
Electoral commissioner Chris Yimoga said he could not give a figure on how many people were affected, with voters also reporting the late and even non-arrival of election officials.
The commission said voters in the affected areas would go back to the polls on Sunday.
“This is very sad indeed,” Peter Ogbuoni, a 31-year-old civil servant, said of Mr Jonathan’s problems as he waited to vote in Otuoke in the oil-producing southern Delta.
“If the president could spend more than 30 minutes without being accredited, I wonder how INEC will claim to have conducted a credible election?”
The Boko Haram threat has dominated the election campaign, with the militant group’s leader Abubakar Shekau threatening to disrupt the vote.
A spate of suicide bombings and attacks on “soft” targets such as markets and bus stations raised fears about the safety of voters and led to stringent security measures countrywide.
The rebels, who were recently pushed out of captured territory in the north-east by a four-nation military coalition, appeared to hold good to that pledge by attacking Gombe state.
At least seven people were killed when suspected Boko Haram gunmen launched separate attacks in the neighbouring villages of Birin Bolawa and Birin Fulani, the town of Dukku and nearby Tilen village.
In the first three attacks voters wer at polling stations were shot at and election materials were burned.
An election official said: “We could hear the gunmen shouting, ‘Didn’t we warn you about staying away from [the] election?’”
The beheadings happened in Buratai on the eve of voting, according to a nurse in Biu and legislator Mohammed Adamu, who represents the town some 200 kilometres from the Borno state capital, Maiduguri.
Voters turned out in force in Maiduguri, which has been repeatedly hit in the insurgency that has left more than 13,000 dead and some 1.5 million homeless.
Civilian vigilantes swept voters, many of them women widowed by the violence or separated from their husbands, with hand-held metal detectors.
“I am ready to cast my vote at whatever cost,” said Tandalami Balami, who fled the recently liberated town of Gwoza to a camp in Maiduguri.
Mr Jonathan, his main challenger Muhammadu Buhari and 12 other candidates are contesting the presidential election, while 2,537 hopefuls from 28 parties are vying for 469 seats in parliament.
The president’s ruling party has been in power since Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 but the result is far from clear this time, with the opposition in its strongest position ever.
The president’s inability to tackle Boko Haram until recently has dominated his tenure and while Nigeria became Africa’s largest economy on his watch, global oil shocks have hit the country hard.
Mr Jonathan has admitted that the election is close, with Mr Buhari, a former military ruler, seen by some as an antidote to endemic government corruption and insecurity.
The technical glitches could not have come at a worse time for Nigeria, after it delayed the scheduled February 14 vote by six weeks on security grounds and after a previous postponement in 2011.
During the election campaign, Mr Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party repeatedly criticised the use of the technology, which is designed to read fingerprints and other personal data in 10 seconds.
It was backed by the main opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), whose candidate Mr Buhari, was accredited without a hitch in his home town of Daura, in the north-east state of Katsina.
Voting began in many places at 1230 GMT, including in Maiduguri and Yola, the capital of neighbouring Adamawa, where polling units had been set up for people made homeless by Boko Haram’s violence.
* Agence France-Presse