Nigerians are waiting anxiously for results of a presidential election amid fears that allegations of irregularities could signal fresh problems for the country's four-year-old democracy.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, a born-again Christian who won power in a military-supervised election in 1999 that ended 15 years of army rule, faced a score of challengers in Saturday's election, but his main opponent was Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim.
Nigeria, the world's eighth biggest oil exporter, is trying to transfer power from one elected civilian government to another for the first time after spending most of its 43 years since independence from Britain governed by military juntas.
Obasanjo and Buhari are ex-generals and former military rulers, but come from opposite ends of Africa's most populous country of 120 million. Obasanjo is from the mainly Christian south and Buhari from the predominantly Muslim north.
Buhari's All Nigeria People's Party, which has accused Obasanjo's People's Democratic Party of rigging parliamentary elections last weekend, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential poll and accompanying governorship elections in all 36 states.
"In Rivers state there were no results sheets. In Bauchi and Kaduna, ballot boxes were still moving when voting had commenced," Buhari's campaign director, Sam Nda-Isaiah, told journalists."But that notwithstanding, we still have to wait for an official result before we come out with a comment."
Voting was generally peaceful in major cities like Lagos, Kano and Ibadan, but opposition officials said six of their supporters were killed by army and police in Bayelsa state in the oil-rich southern Niger Delta. Police put the toll at three.
There was little voting in areas of the south where opposition leaders had called for a voters' boycott to protest at alleged rigging by Obasanjo's party last week."I'm impressed. It was a large turnout. The results may be announced within 48 or 72 hours," Abel Guobadia, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, told reporters after touring polling stations in the capital Abuja.
But Guobadia was forced to admit irregularities when he caught six underage voters at three different polling stations and confiscated their cards.Election observers have not yet published their assessments, but privately many of them expressed concern over what they believed were serious irregularities, especially in the southern states of the Niger Delta.
These concerns included alleged ballot box stuffing and bribery of voters.Derrick Marco of South African observer group Idasa said elections were seriously compromised in the southern states of Enugu and Delta, where clashes in March forced oil companies to shut down 40 percent of Nigeria's oil production.
Marco said that in Delta state's city of Warri, "most of the INEC staff are refusing to conduct the elections because of fear of intimidation and harassment".More than 10,000 people have been killed in ethnic, religious and political clashes in Nigeria since the 1999 election that put Obasanjo in office.