Nigerian ruling party wins seats in flawed re-run

ABUJA, Apr 29 (Reuters) Nigeria's ruling party won more legislators' seats and consolidated its grip on power in several states after rescheduled polls marred by very low turnout and electoral fraud, early results showed today.

The electoral authority re-staged polls for hundreds of federal and state legislators' seats yesterday in places where earlier elections were annulled due to irregularities.

But Reuters reporters in several states said the re-runs showed little improvement on the original polls. Voting slips and ballot boxes were stolen by ruling party supporters in some places and polling stations never opened in others.

Nigerian newspapers reported from around the country that even where polling stations were up and running the turnout was extremely low as voters were poorly informed, fearful of trouble and did not believe their votes would be counted.

Elections on April 14 and 21 delivered a landslide victory for the People's Democratic Party (PDP), which has ruled Africa's most populous nation and biggest oil exporter for eight years.

The elections were billed as a landmark democratic transition in Nigeria, a nation scarred by three decades of army rule because it is the first time that one civilian president is due to hand over to another through the ballot box.

But international observers said fraud was so widespread that the polls were not credible. The opposition rejected the results and called for mass protests.

ANOMALIES Early results today showed the PDP won all outstanding seats in the northern states of Sokoto, Gombe and Kaduna, southeastern Enugu and Anambra, southwestern Oyo and Ekiti, central Plateau and southern Rivers, Nigeria's biggest oil-producing state.

''We corrected some of the anomalies that warranted the postponement of elections ... but not all,'' said Rowland Uwa, the head of the electoral authority in Rivers.

A Reuters reporter in Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers, saw youths shouting PDP slogans and carrying ballot boxes stuffed with voting slips marked for the PDP take over a polling station and scare voters away yesterday. Other polling stations in the city failed to materialise or were deserted.

Enugu, Anambra and Oyo were among states where media reported many polling stations did not open at all yesterday and there were widespread reports of missing voting materials.

In southeastern Imo, the only one of Nigeria's 36 states where the governorship poll was re-run, an opposition candidate was declared the winner today. The PDP was weakened in Imo because it tried to substitute its candidate for governor after the deadline and the Supreme Court ruled it couldn't do that.

In the commercial capital Lagos, the opposition Action Congress consolidated its hold with a clean-sweep of the seats being contested in the re-run.

Lagos, in the southwest, and Kano, the commercial capital of the north, have both been opposition strongholds for years and analysts say it would have been impossible to keep the peace in the volatile cities if the PDP had been declared winner there.

In most other states, the PDP won with huge margins even where there was evidence of massive popular support for opposition candidates.

REUTERS JK RAI2307