Kano: Supporters of the presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari and his All Progressive Congress party celebrate on Tuesday.—Reuters

ABUJA: Three decades after seizing power in a military coup, Muhammadu Buhari became the first Nigerian to oust a president through the ballot box, putting him in charge of Africa’s biggest economy and one of its most turbulent democracies.

As the scale of this weekend’s electoral landslide became clear, President Goodluck Jonathan called Buhari on Tuesday to concede defeat to the opposition leader _ an unprecedented step that should help to defuse anger among Jonathan’s supporters.

According to the latest count, Buhari’s party polled 15.4 million votes while President Jonathan’s party got 13.3m.

In the religiously mixed northern city of Kaduna, where 800 people were killed in violence after the last elections in 2011, Muhammadu Buhari’s supporters streamed onto the streets, waving flags, dancing and singing in celebration.

But Jonathan’s supporters in the Niger Delta, the defeated president’s home area and the heart of Africa’s biggest oil and gas industry, were despondent.

“Goodluck is a stupid man for conceding, a disappointment for Nigeria,” one waitress in the oil city of Port Harcourt said, throwing a beer bottle top at a fridge.

Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has been in charge since the end of army rule in 1999, but had been losing popularity due to a string of corruption scandals and the rise of Boko Haram’s insurgency in the northeast.

“President Jonathan called General Muhammadu Buhari, the winner of the elections, to congratulate him,” Lai Mohammed, a spokesman for Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC), told reporters at the party’s headquarters in the capital, Abuja.

“There had always been this fear that he might not want to concede, but he will remain a hero for this move,” he added.

Published in Dawn, April 1st, 2015

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