KANO, Nigeria — The most competitive presidential race ever in Africa’s largest democracy continued to play out late into Monday night, with the incumbent president facing a tough challenge as voting results poured in from distant states in this crowded and chaotic land.
President ’s difficult night signaled, at the very least, his turbulent tenure in a country that is often seen as the continent’s bellwether. On Mr. Jonathan’s watch, has been beset by a vicious Islamist insurgency, economic fortunes that plunged along with oil revenue, growing economic inequality and corruption scandals. As they went to the polls here on Saturday, voters expressed frustration over those and other issues, and that sentiment appeared to be largely in play Monday night.
With results in from just over half of Nigeria’s 36 states and the capital, the challenger, a retired general who once ruled Nigeria as a military dictator, led by about two million votes in official results. Late Monday, the electoral commission in the capital, Abuja, adjourned the counting, announcing that it would continue Tuesday morning.
But already Mr. Jonathan’s challenger, Muhammadu Buhari, had swept critical competitive states in the country’s southwest. A belated convert to democracy, Mr. Buhari was also piling up large vote totals, as expected, in his native north, crushing the incumbent here in Nigeria’s second-largest city.
If Mr. Jonathan is ousted and power is handed over peacefully, it will signal a historic shift in Nigeria — the first-ever transfer of power between civilians of different parties in a country that has spent much of its post-colonial history roiled by military coups and ruled by their instigators.
It could mean the beginning of a competitive two-party system on a continent where this remains a rarity. International election observers here said Saturday’s vote had generally been conducted well.
But ominous warnings on Monday from Britain and the United States suggested that it was too soon to say Nigeria had left its military-dominated past behind.
“So far, we have seen no evidence of systemic manipulation of the process,” Secretary of State John Kerry and the British foreign minister, Philip Hammond, said in a joint statement. “But there are disturbing indications that the collation process — where the votes are finally counted — may be subject to deliberate political interference.”
A diplomat later explained that “credible reports” had been received “that the army has been asked to go to collation centers around Nigeria” in order “to intimidate” and that the request had come “from the ruling party and the presidency.” The diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a delicate matter, added, “We understood that the request had been made, and we were afraid it might happen. It may have happened.”
A spokesman for Mr. Jonathan later denied any such interference. But military intervention has already occurred once in the election, when the country’s top security officers, who serve at the pleasure of Mr. Jonathan, forced the electoral commission to delay the vote for six weeks.
Those extra six weeks of campaigning and spending gave the incumbent — with far more financial resources than Mr. Buhari — a significant advantage, in the view of analysts. It also allowed a last-minute offensive against the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, with the deployment of South African mercenaries against the extremists. The offensive reclaimed — for now, at least — much of the territory Boko Haram had held in the northeast. The reclamation occurred with military help from neighboring countries. The Nigerian military has claimed the credit for the offensive, however, and a crucial question for the election’s immediate aftermath has been whether security forces would allow power to pass peacefully to Mr. Buhari should Mr. Jonathan be defeated.
With the vote count interrupted, analysts said that Mr. Buhari had already made a strong showing, particularly in states in the southwest and south center, “a really interesting bellwether of what may come,” said Darren Kew, a Nigeria expert at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who is observing the election. “Those are fault-line states,” he said, “and the P.D.P.” — Mr. Jonathan’s party — “had a good machine on the ground there” that nonetheless failed to deliver for the president.
Mr. Buhari’s supporters appear to have been more strongly motivated than those of a president whose reputation has suffered from repeated corruption scandals in his government, as well as the mishandling of the Boko Haram insurgency.
In New York, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council on Monday that Boko Haram had killed more than 7,300 civilians in three states in northern Nigeria since the beginning of 2014. The official, Kyung-wha Kang, the deputy emergency relief coordinator, said 1.5 million people had been displaced in Nigeria and neighboring countries, making the insurgency one of the most pressing humanitarian crises in the world.
Here in Kano — where Mr. Buhari led in the city and surrounding state by nearly 1.7 million votes — enthusiasm for the former general was “very, very high,” said Abubakar Jika Jiddere, a political scientist. Indeed, polling places were packed on Saturday. On Monday the city’s normally teeming streets were emptied of vehicles and pedestrians as residents awaited the results. This city has been repeatedly attacked by Boko Haram.