Goodluck Jonathan... 14th President of Nigeria. He was Governor of Bayelsa State from 9 December 2005 to 28 May 2007, and was sworn in as Vice President on 29 May 2007. Jonathan is a member of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). He is a lover of nifty hats, which makes him easily recognizable unless someone else in the room is wearing a neat chapeau...
's election victory.
The Red Thingy said many people were killed, hundreds injured and thousands displaced in protests across northern Nigeria on Monday by supporters of Jonathan's northern rival, former army ruler Muhammadu Buhari, who say the election result was rigged.
Churches, mosques, homes and shops were razed.
There were pockets of violence outside main cities early on Tuesday, where there was less of a military presence.
"There was an upsurge in areas of Zamfara, Katsina and Kaduna (states) outside the state capitals," said Umar Mairiga, national disaster management coordinator for the Red Thingy.
Rescue workers said they had been unable to reach the worst-affected neighborhoods and could not yet give a corpse count, although a curfew imposed across at least five states appeared to have been relaxed to allow movement in some areas.
Charred tyres lay in side streets for block after block in the Tudun Wada neighborhood of Kaduna. Soldiers manned checkpoints every few hundred meters. The injured spilled onto the street outside an army hospital, several with bloodied bandages around their heads.
Christian residents who decamped to military and police barracks in Kano to shelter during the unrest blamed Buhari, whose party has refused to accept results which say Jonathan won Saturday's election with 59 percent of the vote.
"How can he allege rigging. Jonathan won across the nation. They should accept the results rather than killing and destroying people and property," said Olaoye Ade, who decamped with his wife and children to a police barracks in Kano.
"I am here with my family in the barracks instead of celebrating the nation's new-found democracy."
POLARISED
The election results show how polarized the country of 150 million is, with Buhari, 68, sweeping the north and Jonathan, 53, winning the largely Christian south.
Observers have called the poll the fairest in decades in Africa's most populous nation, which has a long history of votes marred by fraud and intimidation.
Diplomats, analysts and ruling party supporters criticized Buhari, who has strong grass roots support in the north, for failing to come out clearly to call for calm and condemn the violence being perpetrated in his name.
"He has not asked anyone to engage in any violent conduct. He had the capacity to call people out and he didn't. He understands that people feel cheated," Buhari's front man Yinka Odumakin told Rooters.
"General Buhari cannot turn off the tap. He is not the one behind this. He is not the one who did the rigging.
Nigeria is home to more than 200 ethnic groups spread across the country who generally live peacefully side by side, but unrest in the north which is perceived to target Christians has in the past led to reprisals against Mohammedans in the south.
Dozens of members of the northern Hausa ethnic group took refuge in barracks in the southern cities of Enugu and Onitsha fearing attacks by Christian Igbos.
Jonathan appealed for unity in an acceptance speech broadcast to the nation Monday, saying it must "quickly move away from partisan battlegrounds."
Security analysts said they believed the curfews and a show of military force in the north should contain the violence for now but feared that governorship elections in the 36 states in a week's time could become another flashpoint.