Military

DATE=4/23/03

TYPE=Q&A TRANSCRIPT

TITLE=NIGERIA ELECTION

NUMBER=3-664

BYLINE=PESSIN/MCDONOUGH

DATELINE=LONDON/ABUJA

CONTENT=

VOICED AT:

INTRO: Nigeria's political opposition has rejected the results of Saturday's presidential election, which official results indicate President Olusegun Obasanjo won by a large margin. V-O-A's Challiss McDonough in Abuja spoke to V-O-A's Al Pessin in our London Bureau about the opposition's challenge of the election results.

TEXT:

PESSIN: Challiss, I know the opposition, the main opposition party, has rejected the election results, and you just came from a news conference that they held. What did they say?

MCDONOUGH: Well, they're calling for new elections. They basically have issued an ultimatum to President Obasanjo, and told him that they want him out of office by May 29. They say that's as long as the Constitution will allow him to remain in office. They've told him that they want a transitional government, a new electoral commission, and they want new elections held within, they said, six to nine months.

PESSIN: But at the same time, I was seeing reports earlier in the day indicating that the opposition is not planning any sort of violent or active campaign of strikes or demonstrations. Or, has that changed now?

MCDONOUGH: Well, it's not entirely clear. The main opposition contender for the presidency, Muhammadu Buhari, spoke to reporters and told us that he rejects violence. He said, We abhor violence. But he said if there is violence, he said the government is violent, and they have been violent toward the people, and so, if there is violence, then he places the blame for that on the government, on Mr. Obasanjo, and on the ruling party. So I think that, while he is saying he rejects violence, he is also not entirely ruling out the idea that it could happen.

PESSIN: And, of course, there are protests that they could launch that might not necessarily be violent, right?

MCDONOUGH: I think that's possible. He had raised the idea of something he calls mass action before the election, which he said he would call for if he felt it was rigged. He did not really give us a whole lot of detail in this news conference about what he plans to do. He did indicate that he doesn't plan to take the route that has been laid out in Nigeria's electoral law, which is challenging the results of the election in what's called an electoral tribunal, which is a special court set up to hear, specifically, election-related legal challenges. And it sounded to me like he was rejecting the idea of taking the case to the tribunal because he says he does not believe that this was an election that obeyed the rules that are laid out in that electoral law, so he thinks that challenging them under the rules of the electoral law, there's not a whole lot of point to that. So it's not clear at this point what he's planning to do. It just does seem like the opposition has issued this ultimatum to President Obasanjo, and I think, basically, everyone's holding their breath to find out what happens next.

PESSIN: Well, President Obasanjo has said that there may have been some irregularities around the country, but he says no more than in any election in most any other country, and he obviously does accept the results, which were heavily in his favor. What do the international observers say about the election?

MCDONOUGH: Well, there have been a number of international observer missions to make interim statements on the elections, and most of them said that in most of the country, the voting was relatively peaceful and orderly. The European Union was the harshest critic of the election, and said it was basically flawed by irregularities throughout the country, and that there was outright fraud in eleven or twelve states. And they have essentially and, I think, very strongly condemned the election as flawed without basically saying that there were any areas of the country where elections went really well. They said even in the areas where things were orderly and peaceful, there were still irregularities in those areas. Most of the observer groups have singled out the southern regions of the country, particularly the southeast Niger Delta region, as particularly flawed, and essentially most of the observers are saying that there just wasn't a whole lot of voting going on in that area on election day, and that the results that have been returned from that area are not really credible. So what one of them said is it was hardly an election in a few of those states. And so I think that the biggest questions are around that area of the country. The opposition are saying that there are questions in other areas of the country. Mr. Obasanjo's party are saying that one of the opposition parties tried to rig the elections in the northern areas of the country, and they are saying that they are planning to challenge some of the governors' race results in the northern areas where they lost. So it seems like even the people who are happy with the election are unhappy with it.

PESSIN: And the next big day to watch, then, is May 29, as you report, the date by which the opposition wants President Obasanjo to step down, which he is not likely to do, and then we'll see what steps the opposition takes.

MCDONOUGH: I think that's exactly the case. We'll wait until May 29 and see what unfolds between then and now. There could be. Mr. Obasanjo's party has not ruled out the idea of a government of national unity. They had that question put to them this morning, and they didn't say that was out of the question. They said they would do whatever was necessary basically to keep Nigeria together and move things forward.

PESSIN: All right, thank you, Challiss. That's V-O-A's Challiss McDonough in Abuja, and I'm Al Pessin, V-O-A News in London.

NEB/CM/AWP/RH