Africa's largest economy has doubts about democracy

The three businessmen at Lagos airport were visibly angry: "The elections must be repeated," demanded the first loudly. "We will not accept these elections," complained the second. The third went a step further: Nigeria should go back to the military rule of the 1990s right away, he raged. It had already become apparent that the governing All Progressive Congress (APC) party would remain in power. The result was not announced until Wednesday morning, at 4:10 a.m. to be precise - four days after the election.

After eight meager years of economic crises, former President Muhammadu Buhari, 80, handed over to his party colleague Bola Tinubu, 70, who won 37 percent of the vote. The two are far from allies, but Buhari praised the new leader "as the best man for the job". Tinubu appealed to the defeated opposition to accept the result. "This is the only nation we have," he said, "we must build it together." Losers Atiku Abubakar (29 percent) and Peter Obi (25 percent) are expected to challenge the result in court.

220 million people live in Nigeria, it has the largest population and economy in Africa. In a few decades, the country will be the second largest democracy in the world after India because of its rapid population growth. Elections in Nigeria, which cooperates militarily with the US, are having an impact on the region, which has recently seen increased military coups and Russian influence.

The balance sheet is sobering. A new biometric voting system should speed up counting after the chaotic elections in 2019 and make manipulation more difficult - Nigeria is counted among the 30 most corrupt countries in the world by the think tank "Transparency International". In 2019, the election was postponed just a few hours before the polls were held, and when the time came, it also took four days for the results to be announced.

This time things went a little better. At 27 percent, voter turnout was the lowest since the end of military rule in 1999. And that was not primarily due to disenchantment with politics, but more to the enormous logistical challenges. Not only for the overwhelmed electoral commission, they affected the entire people.

In Maiduguri, a city in the north of the country, polling stations were scheduled to open at 8:30 a.m. A young man was there at 7 a.m. – but all the voting documents were not available until 1 p.m. "I see it as my duty as a citizen to cast my vote," he said just before it was his turn at 2:30 p.m. After more than seven hours in heat beyond 35 degrees.

By no means all of the 87 million people who had been entered in the electoral roll succeeded. On election day, for security reasons, only trips to the polling station were allowed to vote, and accordingly few taxis were available. All flights have been cancelled. There has been hardly any cash nationwide for weeks, an anti-corruption measure that was also intended to stop the popular buying of votes in Nigeria in the past

But all of this, combined with the security crisis in many parts of the country, meant that not everyone was able to go to their polling station. And many went home after hours of unsuccessful queuing. International election observers accordingly criticized the logistical problems, violence at many polling stations and the slow counting. Joyce Banda, ex-President of Malawi and chair of the delegation of international election observers, spoke of an "undermining of public confidence in the conduct of the elections".

Many Nigerians in the Christian-dominated South chose Obi for third place, which is the heart of the Nigerian economy. The Catholic Obi, who ran for the comparatively small Labor Party, won, among other things, the economic metropolis Lagos - although Tinubu had once acted quite successfully as governor here.

But the majority of the population lives in the predominantly Muslim north - and the majority voted for the Muslim Tinubu, even if he comes from the south. In the north-eastern city of Maiduguri, his party, which had access to the state coffers for the election campaign, literally papered the streets with election posters.

Not a single poster of Obi was found in the days leading up to the election. His 25 percent is a remarkable achievement, but his party simply lacked the resources to generate enough votes in the north. In this election, too, Nigeria overwhelmingly voted based on religious, regional and ethnic considerations - and regardless of the fact that Tinubu's election program was not very conceptual.

One has to be skeptical - and this is putting it benevolently - that the APC, which will remain in power, will be able to get Nigeria's enormous problems under control. There have been some successes in the fight against Boko Haram's terror, including against piracy - just a few days ago, major international insurers announced that transport ships sailing off Nigeria's coast would no longer have to pay the highest insurance fees from war zones. Thanks to a new surveillance system, there hasn't been a raid on an international freighter in over a year.

But under Buhari, Nigeria experienced one economic crisis after another - and new rules that paralyzed the economy and foreign trade. The result is a shortage of foreign exchange, a rapidly increasing debt burden and a 21 percent inflation rate. The security situation has also deteriorated. Last year there were 10,000 deaths in conflicts such as that between pastoralists and settlers. In addition, there are more than 1000 kidnapping victims every year.

But hardly anyone wants a return to military rule. "Anyone who says something like that has never lived under military decrees," says journalist Isma'il Abdulrahim, "I experienced that in the 1990s. Back then, you could never have publicly expressed your dissatisfaction with the elections.”