Nigerian president calls for peace at the polls

ABUJA, NIGERIA Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan urged his nation to vote peacefully and accept the results of Saturday’s presidential elections, which analysts say will be the most tightly contested in the history of Africa’s richest nation and its largest democracy.

“No political ambition can justify violence or the shedding of the blood of our people,” Jonathan, who is running for re-election, said Friday in a televised broadcast.

In a country steeped in a history of coups, bloodshed caused by politics, ethnicity, land disputes and, lately, the Boko Haram Islamic uprising, the election is important as Africa’s most populous nation consolidates its democracy.

“It’s just healthy that they approach this as an exercise of the rights of Nigerians to choose their government and not as a war,” the UN secretary general’s special envoy to West Africa, Mohammed Ibn Chambas, said.

Nigeria’s political landscape was transformed when the main opposition parties formed a coalition two years ago and for the first time united behind one candidate, former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari who is Jonathan’s main challenger.

The election is only the eighth since independence from Britain in 1960 and the first ever to raise the possibility of a democratic transfer of power through the ballot box, a high-stakes contest in Africa’s biggest oil producer where patronage and corruption are rife. No incumbent has ever lost an election.

It should be “cause for celebration,” said Chidi Odinkalu, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission. But he noted it has spawned “the most extraordinary form of hate speech, incendiary vituperations, ethnic bating; all the things you are not supposed to do.”

His state-sponsored but independent organization reported at least 58 killings by Feb. 13 and there have been many more since then, Odinkalu said. He also complained that politicians have done little to dampen tensions.

Meanwhile, Nigeria’s military announced it had destroyed the headquarters of Boko Haram’s so-called Islamic caliphate, in the northeastern town of Gwoza, in fighting Friday that left several extremists dead.