In addition, 2.3 million voters who came for accreditation in the morning of the election failed to return later in the day to cast the actual ballot.
Final figures of the Presidential Elections as released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) show that only 47 percent of registered Nigerian voters bothered to show up to elect a president for Africa’s most populous nation.
The poor voter turnout was very visible in four of Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones where less than 50% of voters showed up.
The exceptions were the South South and North West zones where, incidentally, the two major candidates come from. The South South region recorded 56% voter turnout, followed closely by the North West at 54 percent turnout.
In contrast, the poorest voter turnouts were recorded in the South East where 60 percent of registered voters did not go to the polling booths, and the South West where 59 percent also stayed away.
Among the two high scoring zones, states with the heaviest turnouts include Rivers (71% voter turnout), Delta (66%), Akwa Ibom (65%), Jigawa and Bayelsa (64% each), Sokoto and Zamfara (59% each), Katsina (56%), and Kaduna (52%).
Only three other states outside the two catchment zones recorded voter turnout of 50 percent and above. These are Plateau (NC, 54%) and Bauchi (NE, 53%) and Osun (SW, 50%).
The results challenge many of the assumptions being made that voting was depressed in the South and promoted freely in the Northern parts of the country.
They also debunk many of the narratives on voting behavior of specific groups and zones in the elections, as Abuja Echo has shown in an earlier report on the polls.
