BBC News with Fiona MacDonald
Preliminary results from Nigeria’s presidential election show the
incumbent
Goodluck Jonathan appears to have won
outright
in the first round. Mr Jonathan, a Christian from the oil-producing Niger Delta, so far has almost twice the number of votes of his main rival, the former military leader, Muhammadu Buhari. General Buhari’s main support base is in the
predominantly
Muslim north. Here is Caroline Duffield in Abuja.
It looks very much as if Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan is set for victory in the country’s elections. Results are still slowly coming in and being formally declared by Nigeria’s election authorities. But official figures published regionally show President Jonathan has already secured the vital
threshold
he needs to win in the first round. According to regional results, he has at least 25% of the vote in at least 24 of Nigeria’s states. So far, he has 20.3 million votes to the 10.4 million of his nearest rival, General Buhari.
The former prime minister of Egypt Ahmed Nazif and two other former members of the government are to stand trial on charges of misusing public funds. Yolande Knell reports from Cairo.
The general prosecutor’s office says that the three former ministers will all face charges of
squander
ing public funds. Investigators had been looking into a deal involving a contract to manufacture license plates for the interior ministry worth about 15 million dollars. The former prime minister Ahmed Nazif has already been detained. He is in Tora prison on the outskirts of Cairo with the former interior minister Habib al-Adly who is currently on trial on charges relating to the killing of protesters in Egypt’s uprising.