24 (EUROPA PRESS)
The Nigerian authorities have ordered the “total closure” of the land borders coinciding with the presidential and parliamentary elections to be held this Saturday, marked by a serious economic crisis and the rise of insecurity in the African country.
“The Federal Government has ordered the total closure of all land borders from 00:00 on Saturday, February 25 to 00:00 on Sunday, February 26, 2023,” the Nigerian Immigration Service said.
Thus, the agency has stressed in a statement that “all command controllers, especially in border states, must guarantee strict compliance with this order.”
“We are committed to the Nigeria Project while guaranteeing that, within the parameters of the powers that the relevant laws give us, the next elections are free, fair and devoid of anomalies,” he said in his account on the social network Twitter .
For his part, the former Kenyan president and observer of the African Union (AU), Uhuru Kenyatta, has stated that he considers that the authorities “are quite confident” in the possibility of holding “free, fair and transparent” elections.
Kenyatta has highlighted in statements given to the British BBC television channel that the process will have “challenges”, although he has stressed that the presidential candidates have told him that they will be able to “overcome” them.
Among the main challenges are the economic crisis, exacerbated by the shortage of new naira notes, insecurity, and allegations of vote buying and corruption cases linked to the elections.
For this reason, Kenyatta has shown his hope that these problems do not lead to low participation and has stressed that the elections are of great importance because Nigeria “is the largest democracy on the African continent” and one of the largest in the world. world.
The successor to the current president, Muhammadu Buhari, will emerge from this Saturday’s elections, and he cannot run because he has already fulfilled the term limit set by the Nigerian Constitution.
This time around, the dispute features a third-way candidate, Peter Obi, who hopes to break the traditional dominance of the two main Nigerian parties, Buhari’s All Progressives Party (APP), which has nominated the former governor of Lagos Bola Tinubu, and the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has former vice president Atiku Abubakar.
The presidential elections are also the first time since the return of the country to civilian rule in 1999 in which none of the candidates is a former military leader, as was the case with Buhari, who was in charge of the country between December 1983 and August 1985 after a coup.
