Bodies in streets after Nigeria election riots
So Nigeria just had a presidential election. The mostly-Christian south voted for the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, while the mostly-Muslim north voted for challenger Muhammadu Buhari. Jonathan won, and then all hell broke loose.
Hundreds have been injured and thousands displaced by violence across the mostly-Muslim north after President Goodluck Jonathan won weekend elections. His rival, northerner and ex-military ruler Muhammadu Buhari, says the vote was rigged.
Charred corpses lay in the Gonin-Gora neighborhood of Kaduna on Tuesday, one of them apparently “necklaced” with a burning tyre. Health workers had already collected a dozen bodies there. One picked up a severed foot.
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Churches, mosques, homes and shops were set ablaze on Monday as Buhari’s supporters, some chanting his name, went on the rampage. “No more PDP” — a reference to Jonathan’s ruling party — was written in chalk beside one body lying in Kaduna.
Nigeria’s been democratic since 1999, but it’s had a poor record with elections so far. The elections in 1999, 2003, and 2007 were all considered flawed by outside observers for various reasons: voter intimidation and violence, rigged votes, etc. These most recent elections just happened a few days ago, so it’s still unknown if there was any manipulation of the results, but post-election violence has unfortunately been covered.
“We had a young boy, 7 years old, with a gunshot wound to the stomach,” he said.
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“They said are you Christian or Muslim? I lied and said I was Muslim but they didn’t believe me and they beat me and cut me … I heard them ask people PDP or CPC? If they saw a PDP poster they burned the building,” he said.
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“No way will I vote and other people here won’t because these next elections will be very cruel,” said Femi Eseyin, a football coach whose brother died in the violence.
“We’ve had enough elections now.”
Those last remarks from Eseyin are the most depressing. There’s a lot of shit wrong with our political system, yes, but there’s that, and then there’s this.