Author: Dionne Searcey and Emmanuel Akinwotu / Source: New York Times
Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
ABUJA, Nigeria — The leading presidential candidates in Nigeria urged their supporters to be patient on Saturday after officials said the election would be delayed by a week, just hours before the polls were to open.
In their 2:30 a.m. announcement of the postponement, election officials cited concerns about the logistics of delivering voting equipment. Millions of people, including President Muhammadu Buhari, had traveled long distances to their home districts to be in place to vote — Nigeria has no absentee voting system — and frustration was palpable.
The political parties of Mr. Buhari and his leading opponent, Atiku Abubakar, both condemned the decision, and each accused the other’s candidate of gaining an advantage from the delay.
The leaders of Mr. Buhari’s party said Mr. Abubakar would benefit from “a breather” and that his party had been “bent on discrediting this process the moment it realized it cannot make up the numbers to win this election.”
Mr. Abubakar’s party, for its part, accused the president of orchestrating the delay to suppress voter turnout. “Their plan is to provoke the public, hoping for a negative reaction, and then use that as an excuse for further antidemocratic acts,” the party said in a statement.
Yet both camps also urged supporters to be patient in the face of a delay that risks inflaming tensions in an already tense election.
The decision upended the plans of millions of people, including huge teams of international observers from the…
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