The New Yorker:

The observance of defeat, especially in an election, is often all that keeps a state from tipping into violence.

By Barbara F. Walter

The election was all anyone could talk about. The country would soon choose a new President, and conversations in homes, marketplaces, and houses of worship were dominated by a single topic: Who would win? Lurking behind these discussions was a more ominous question: Would there be violence? During the previous election, four years earlier, mobs had burned buildings, snatched ballot boxes, and targeted government leaders for assassination. When the outcome was announced, supporters of the vanquished candidate had erupted. The election, they claimed, had been stolen. Roughly two hundred people died in a matter of days.

Nigerians knew that the 2011 Presidential election might be similar. Muhammadu Buhari, the retired general who had lost in 2007, was facing off against the sitting President, Goodluck Jonathan. Buhari was running as a populist, an avowed outsider, despite the fact that he had been the country’s military head of state in the eighties, before the modern Presidency was established. He promised to bring order and security to Nigerians, and his main base of support came from the country’s rural and working-class voters, who loved him. When Buhari ran and lost in 2003 and 2007, he claimed the elections had been rigged. He challenged the results in court, but both times his case was dismissed.

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