I'm the people's choice, re-elected leader tells opponents

Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo has urged opposition parties to "accept defeat gracefully" and drop threats of massive protests over balloting they say was rigged, following his landslide re-election.

Out of more than 42 million votes, Obasanjo won 62% in the weekend balloting, compared with 32% for his leading rival, former junta leader Muhammadu Buhari, the election commission announced.

More than 2.5 million votes were declared invalid.

Before the announcement, a leader of Buhari’s party stormed into the commission headquarters and said the group was refusing to accept the results.

The party has claimed massive rigging. International election observers have also worried about fraud.

But in a televised address, Obasanjo dismissed the charges, calling the vote “peaceful, free and transparent”.

“Good politicians should be really good sportsmen, showing magnanimity and humility in victory and gallantry and good-naturedness in defeat,” he said.

“I’m humbled by the fact that I’m the people’s choice,” he added.

The vote is a test of stability and democracy in Africa’s most populous nation.

Election-related violence has so far been sporadic in a country frequently riven by bloodletting.

But tensions were running high after opposition officials claimed the vote was rigged.

Don Etiebet, chairman of Buhari’s party, warned that opposition supporters “will act appropriately according to human nature”.

“We do not need to tell the people what to do. They will know what to do when their mandate has been trampled upon,” he said, without elaborating.

Officials in Buhari’s party have warned that the people “will fight”, and Buhari himself has threatened mass action, a term that in Nigeria generally refers to violent protests.

Since an April 12 legislative vote, at least 35 people have died in election-related attacks.

Nigeria, a country of 126 million people, has never seen a civilian government successfully hand over power to another.

Although it is one of the world’s largest oil exporters, it is desperately poor and has a history of coups and unrest.