KANO, NIGERIA // The violent aftermath of the April 6 presidential elections continues to reverberate across northern Nigeria, with details emerging about killings in rural villages and abuses by security forces in urban areas.
President Goodluck Jonathan, who was returned to his post by a substantial margin over his principal challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim, has appealed for calm and told the perpetrators of the violence that "enough is enough".
Mr Jonathan said in a statement on Thursday that the "acts of mayhem", initially sparked by opposition supporters protesting Mr Buhari's defeat, which they claim came due to rigging in Saturday's vote, are reminders of the terrible 1967 Biafran war that rocked Nigeria after independence.
Churches and mosques, homes and businesses were burnt in Kano and Kaduna earlier in the week, while in the countryside, stories of charred corpses and burnt cars were emerging last Friday.
The post-elections violence has struck at the heart of the struggle of Africa's most-populous nation to embrace unity in a country where deeply religious Muslims and Christians from more than 200 ethnic groups have often been forced to accept politics as a "do-or-die" enterprise.
The common wisdom goes that having a president from one's community is often the only means of accessing a fraction of the immense spoils that accrue to the government as revenue from its immense oil and gas reserves.
Northern voters saw Mr Buhari, who once ruled the country as a military strongman, as their only chance to have their needs and interests represented at the federal level. His defeat quickly ignited existing resentment among the impoverished and unemployed masses in the arid expanses on the edge of the Sahel desert.
This month's elections, which are being held in three stages, with the parliamentary and presidential polls complete and the state governor vote looming this week, were immediately praised by Nigerian and international observers as a clear improvement over the three rigged and violent contests that Nigeria has held since it abandoned military rule in 1999.
Even so, a statement on Tuesday by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stressed that although the vote was broadly a "success", it was "far from perfect". Mrs Clinton called on Nigeria's electoral commission to take action on the many allegations put forth by observer groups of under-age voters, intimidation and ballot stuffing.
Mrs Clinton made a veiled reference to the issue of "inordinately high turnout in some areas of the country", notably in Mr Jonathan's home state of Bayelsa, in the oil-rich Delta, where turnout was recorded as upwards of 85 per cent.
Although the government and relief groups including the Nigerian Red Cross have been reluctant to release figures on the number of people killed and displaced in last week's violence in 13 northern states for fear of sparking reprisals, the independent Civil Rights Congress in Kaduna, where the worst violence has occurred, told reporters on Wednesday that they had confirmed more than 200 deaths.
The riots in the cities of Kano and Kaduna, which were started by Muslim youth supporters of Mr Buhari, launched reprisal attacks in some rural areas against both Christian and Muslim communities - groups that have in many cases lived together in peace for many years.
Nasir Abbas of the Civil Rights Congress in Kaduna told The National last Friday that his organisation condemned the excessive use of force by security forces in their attempt to quell the violence in the city.
Mr Abbas alleged that security forces had used live rounds against protesters and helicopters to fire at them in the Regasa neighbourhood of Kaduna. Mr Abbas said the police arrested innocent civilians not involved in the protests and targeted opposition supporters, who were not the only individuals involved in the violence.
On Friday, Human Rights Watch reissued its call for the Nigerian government to ensure the responsible conduct of its security forces, particularly now that violence has broken out in the aftermath of the presidential polls.
In the run-up to this month's election season, the New York-based group had published a report urging the candidates to enact reforms, particularly among its corrupt and abusive police service.
In Zonkwa, a town in eastern Kaduna state, witnesses told the Associated Press on Thursday that hundreds were killed in that town alone as part of the wave of killings in rural communities that followed the urban riots.
In Kano, an ancient Muslim trading city, the evangelical church organisation has reported that 22 churches were burnt in the Monday violence. The church group added that the unrest was quickly contained by security forces who shot in the air to restore calm as youth marched through the streets armed with wooden clubs and cutlasses.
Kano remains under an evening curfew and shops and markets in the mostly Christian area of the city were shuttered during the days following the street battles here.
Although Mr Jonathan pledged last Thursday that Tuesday's state governor elections would go ahead as planned, the independent electoral commission announced yesterday that elections would not be held in the still-volatile states of Bauchi and Kaduna, where protesters set fire to the electoral commission office and young children were wounded in cross-fire.
