Incumbent Mahamadou Issoufou will face opposition candidate Hama Amadou.

Incumbent President Mahamadou Issoufou  and his main opposition challenger, Hama Amadou are back to the political drawing board in Niger, mapping out strategies  that will make one of them emerge as the final winner of the March 20, 2016 presidential election run- off in the country.

They are the two candidates the country’s National Independent Electoral Commission  on Friday, February 26 declared to have occupied the first and second positions in  the first round of the presidential election that held on February 21, 2016. Incumbent Mahamadou Issoufou came first scoring 48.4 per cent of the votes cast, thereby falling short of the 50 per cent absolute majority. His main challenger, Hama Amadou, won 17.7 per cent of the votes in the presidential poll whose participation rate, the Election Commission put at 66.7 per cent.

Niger’s presidential election goes into political history records as one of the most curious considering that Mahamadou Issoufou’s main challenger, Hama Amadou came second without having openly campaigned. The Constitutional Court declared him one of the candidates when he was already in prison accused of trafficking babies. The entire campaign period passed when he was behind bars and even after being declared second in first round of the poll, he is still in prison.

Should nothing extraordinary happens, campaigns and voting for the second round on March 20, 2016 may still take place while he is still in prison. His lawyers consider the imprisonment as political considering that the Constitutional Court declared itself incompetent to release him arguing that the judicial procedure has to be followed. In the first round, he campaigned by proxy and that is likely going to be the case in the second round.

The opposition coalition remains confident that Hama Amadou will win the second round of the presidential poll despite the more that 1.4 million votes difference incumbent Issoufou had over him in the first round. The spokesperson of the coalition, Ousseini Salatou remains upbeat that there will be change at the helm of State in Niger after the March 20 presidential election run-off.