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.
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