Angolans voted yesterday in their first peacetime elections with the ruling leftwing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) expected to keep a firm grip on the war-ravaged new oil power while the opposition said the poll is unfair.
Six years after the end of a 27-year civil war that left 500,000 people dead, handfuls of people gathered outside Luanda polling stations as they opened to cast votes.
About 8 million people registered to vote in the first attempt to hold a poll since failed elections in 1992. However no one expects a serious challenge to Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos’ MPLA.
PHOTO: EPA
“It’s important, we need to move forward because the elections have been delayed for too long,” said Daniel Hiyelekwa, 58, who voted in the upmarket Cidade Alta neigborhood near the presidential palace.
“In six years of peace there have been many changes. We will move into a higher gear to develop the country,” he said.
The MPLA was originally a Marxist-Leninist group but is now nominally social democratic. Its control of the oil and diamond industries has given the opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) little chance to build momentum since 2002.
UNITA and human rights groups criticized the campaign as unfair as the MPLA received massive state funding and media coverage.
“The system in which these elections were organized is not fair ... this campaign was very unbalanced,” said UNITA leader Isaias Samakuva on the eve of the election.
The ruling party denies the campaign was biased but dos Santos, who has been in power for three decades, pledged change at an extravagant final campaign rally on Wednesday.
“For us, change does not necessarily come about by a change of party. To change public policies which haven’t worked ... We must change the members of the team who are bad,” said Dos Santos, appearing to acknowledge his government’s failure to distribute its massive oil wealth.
Despite the new wealth from being Africa’s leading oil producer, two-thirds of Angolans still live on less than US$2 a day.
The MPLA says however that it is the only party capable of continuing the rebuilding of a country where communication systems and roads have been ravaged by three decades of war.
Millions of Angolans have moved to Luanda in recent years as they are unable to make a living in rural areas, where agriculture and small industry is virtually non-existent and land mines are still a danger.
“I am looking forward to vote because I want Angola to change,” 22-year-old Pai Bando said.
“They [the elite] get all the money from the oil and the diamonds, they get everything and we get nothing,” the unemployed Bando said.
Bando said he would not vote for UNITA, despite its promise of a fairer distribution of wealth, because he feels only the MPLA is strong enough to make changes.
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
SEVEN-MINUTE HEIST: The masked thieves stole nine pieces of 19th-century jewelry, including a crown, which they dropped and damaged as they made their escape The hunt was on yesterday for the band of thieves who stole eight priceless royal pieces of jewelry from the Louvre Museum in the heart of Paris in broad daylight. Officials said a team of 60 investigators was working on the theory that the raid was planned and executed by an organized crime group. The heist reignited a row over a lack of security in France’s museums, with French Minister of Justice yesterday admitting to security flaws in protecting the Louvre. “What is certain is that we have failed, since people were able to park a furniture hoist in the middle of
RSS