Turnout in Nigeria’s presidential election was the lowest on record — with fewer than 3 out of 10 people who registered and collected voting cards casting their ballots.
(Bloomberg) — Turnout in Nigeria’s presidential election was the lowest on record — with fewer than 3 out of 10 people who registered and collected voting cards casting their ballots.
There had been optimism ahead of the Feb. 25 vote — won by the ruling party’s Bola Tinubu — that the contest would reverse a steady decline in participation in the West African country’s recent polls. In the run-up to the election, in which for the first time three candidates campaigned with a credible shot at victory, the voter roll swelled by more than 9 million. About 87.2 million Nigerians were eligible to vote.
But, on the day, just 28.6% of the voters exercised their franchise in Africa’s biggest democracy. That’s the lowest turnout since the end of military rule in 1999 and compares with 34.8% in 2019. In Kenya, about two-thirds of the electorate voted in that nation’s presidential election in August.
The winner in Kenya, William Ruto, finished with four-fifths the number of ballots that Tinubu received despite Nigeria having four times as many eligible voters.
The numbers might not tell the whole story in Africa’s most populous nation of more than 200 million people. New technology used to verify the identity of those present at polling units made it more difficult for ineligible or non-existent voters to inflate the statistics.
“Ghosts will not come to vote,” an election commission spokesman told local media in April before the agency tested the accreditation devices in local polls.
Electoral officials also opened many polling units hours late, unequally distributed voters among them and struggled to work the new devices, meaning an unknown number of Nigerians who had intended to participate went home without casting their ballot.
Less than half of the polling units had commenced voting as of 9.30 a.m., one hour after they were scheduled to open, Yiaga Africa, which monitored the election, said in a report on Wednesday.
Analysis by Lagos-based SBM Intelligence on the morning of the vote estimated that more than 40% of registered voters turned up to cast their ballot in about half of Nigeria’s 37 states and territories.
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