Tandja faces run-off after leading first round poll

President Mamadou Tandja of Niger, who is seeking a second five-year term, has won the first round of presidential elections. However, he faces a run-off against his main challenger on 4 December after failing to secure an absolute majority. According to provisional results published by the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), Tandja won 40.67 percent of the votes cast in the first round on 16 November, eight points more than in the first round of the 1999 presidential election which brought him to power. Tandja, a 66-year-old retired amy colonel, is the first elected leader of this arid landlocked country to have completed a full term of office without being deposed by a coup. Underlining the consolidation of democracy in Niger, which held its first multiparty polls in 1993, international observers present said the first round of the presidential election was “democratic, free and transparent.” “Generally, the poll was calm,” the 92 observers from the African Union and European Union said in a joint statement. “Voters showed discipline and good citizenship.” Tandja's challenger in the second round run-off will be opposition leader and former prime minister Mahamadou Issoufou. He won 24.60 percent of the vote in the first round of the election, three points more than in 1999, when he lost to Tandja in the second round. Two of the six presidential candidates who took part in the first round of this year's election have already pledged their combined 12.42 percent of the vote to Tandja in the second ballot. This will take place at the same time as elections for a new parliament. Mahamane Ousmane, who came third with 17.43 pecent of the vote, has not yet indicated who he will support in the second round. However, in the past he has swung his support behind Tandja. Ousmane, who is speaker of parliament, helped the current head of state to win power five years ago by supporting him in the second round of the presidential election. And more recently his Social Democratic Convention (CDS) party formed an alliance with Tandja's National Movement for Society and Development (MNSD) which won local government elections in July this year. CENI won widespread praise for its handling of the first round of the presidential election. It faced the daunting task of collecting results from 14,533 polling stations, many of them unreachable by telephone, in a country that is twice the size of France, the former colonial power. According to CENI, 48.5 percent of Niger's five million eligible voters cast a ballot. Niger, which consists mainly of desert, is one of the world’s poorest countries. Depending on meagre earnings from the export of cotton and uranium, it ranks second from bottom - just above Sierra Leone -in the Human Development Index of 177 countries published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). According to this global yardstick of living conditions, 61.4 percent of Niger's 11 million population lives on less than one US dollar a day. Only one in five of the country's inhabitants enjoys proper sanitation and only four out of 10 have access to clean drinking water. The desert north of Niger was the scene of an insurgency by Tuareg nomads in the early 1990s and has recently seen an upsurge in banditry and violence.