BSS :
Voters in the volatile southeastern Nigerian state of Anambra go to the polls on Saturday amid a massive police deployment, in a key test of electoral credibility ahead of a presidential race less than 18 months away.
More than 30,000 police have been deployed to Anambra, the heart of a region where an outlawed separatist movement has been blamed for a string of attacks on police and election offices.
Analysts say turnout and the organisation of the vote will determine public trust in Nigeria’s electoral commission as the 2023 presidential ballot looms. One of the three frontrunners in Saturday’s governorship race, former Central Bank chief Charles Chukwuma Soludo, has been a target for gunmen.
In March, assailants opened fire at a community meeting as he wrapped up a speech. A few months later, armed men on motorbikes hit one of his rally venues as he was campaigning elsewhere. Soludo, brandishing his credentials as an economic professor, is running for the All Progressive Grand Alliance, which has governed Anambra for more than a decade and a half.
That dominance is now challenged in a tight race with President Muhammadu Buhari’s ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party and main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
Campaigning has been low-key. Attacks blamed on the separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), or
“unknown gunmen,” and repeated shutdown protests by the separatists over the arrest of their leader have rattled residents by closing markets and businesses.
