Nigerians vote again as governorship elections hold in 28 states

Nigerians are returning to the polls today to elect governors in 28 of the country’s 36 states. They are also electing state lawmakers in those states.

The elections are holding a week later than initially billed. The date was changed after the electoral commission said it needed more time to reset its BVAS voter accreditation machines following the Feb. 25 presidential elections.

– Players to watch

The major political parties to watch in the elections are the All Progressives Congress, the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party. The APC controls 22 states while the PDP controls 13. The remaining state, Anambra, is led by the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA).

The Labour Party, which has no state, will be buoyed by its performance in the presidential elections in which it won in 12 states, as many as the declared winner APC did.

Relatively smaller parties like the New Nigeria Peoples Party and Young Progressives Party are also being watched in states like Kano and Akwa Ibom were they field popular candidates.

The contest is expected to be particularly keen in the APC-controlled Lagos. Since 1999, the nation’s commercial capital has remained under the influence of Nigeria’s now president-elect, Bola Tinubu, its former governor, who played overwhelming role in deciding his successors since he left office in 2007.

This time, Gov Babjide Sanwo-Olu, who is seeking a second term, faces real threat from the PDP’s Olajide Adediran and the LP’s Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour. The LP won the presidential election in Lagos and is pushing to extend that gain on Saturday.

The Labour Party is also seeking to galvanise its “Obidient” structure to take other states, especially in the southern part of the country. It has nine governorship candidates. The APC and PDP have candidates in all the states taking part in the polls.

Winners will be inaugurated on May 29 alongside the president for a term of four years.

– Dousing concerns

Authorities have imposed restrictions on movement amid concerns of violence and intimidation of voters in some states.

After INEC’s failure to load up results electronically in the presidential elections, the commission said it is better prepared to transmit election results in real time to its portal called iRev.

“The commission is determined to improve on its previous performance. What we have done is to learn valuable lessons from previous elections that we conducted, and we’re going to put those lessons into our planning purposes and processes, and into our deployment purposes,” the commission’s chairman, information and voter education committee, Festus Okoye, said on Arise TV on Friday.

On the commission’s level of preparedness, he said “In all the states of the federation, both the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines and all the sensitive election materials have left the Central Bank and the various state offices of the federation.

“We want to ensure that all polling units open on time. Secondly, we made sure that we reconfigured all the BVAS that will be used for this particular election in terms of making sure that the BVAS perform optimally and also making sure that some of the challenges we had in the previous elections do not reoccur.”