The leader of Angola’s largest opposition party said yesterday that people had been forced to vote against their wishes in the country’s parliamentary election and he was contesting the results.
Preliminary returns from the poll showed the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) headed for a landslide victory.
But the controversy threatens to shatter the fragile political stability that has existed since the end of Angola’s civil war in 2002.
PHOTO: AFP
“There are people that were instructed, who were forced to vote, [for] a particular party. I wonder how this election was free,” UNITA leader Isaias Samakuva said in an interview on South Africa’s SAfm radio yesterday, apparently refering to the MPLA.
Samakuva said earlier that the two-day vote had been badly flawed, with polling stations opening late or not at all and officials failing to properly confirm the identify of voters on registration lists.
Voting began on Friday but was extended into Saturday because of delays and confusion at polling stations in Luanda Province, home to 21 percent of Angola’s 8.3 million voters.
The government has denied any electoral wrongdoing, while admitting there had been administrative glitches in some areas.
Preliminary results, based on slightly more than two-thirds of the vote, show the MPLA with about 82 percent of the national vote versus 10.5 percent for UNITA and leading in all 18 provinces.
Asked what course of action UNITA, a former rebel movement, would take if Angola’s electoral commission let the results stand, Samakuva said: “We will take the steps correspondent to the action from the National Electoral Commission.”
Smaller parties have also voiced their disapproval with the electoral process. The new Party for Social Renovation President Eduardo Kuangana — whose party is coming in at third in most provinces — told Portuguese news agency LUSA that the process was “not transparent and was corrupted from the beginning.
The international community has been watching the vote closely after tarnished elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya, hoping that the former Portuguese colony would defy its own history and emerge from the election with political consensus.
Luanda touted the ballot as a showcase for its recovery from the war and hoped that it would spur foreign investment for its booming economy. Angola rivals Nigeria as sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest oil producer.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘POINT OF NO RETURN’: The Caribbean nation needs increased international funding and support for a multinational force to help police tackle expanding gang violence The top UN official in Haiti on Monday sounded an alarm to the UN Security Council that escalating gang violence is liable to lead the Caribbean nation to “a point of no return.” Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Haiti Maria Isabel Salvador said that “Haiti could face total chaos” without increased funding and support for the operation of the Kenya-led multinational force helping Haiti’s police to tackle the gangs’ expanding violence into areas beyond the capital, Port-Au-Prince. Most recently, gangs seized the city of Mirebalais in central Haiti, and during the attack more than 500 prisoners were freed, she said.
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
RSS