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.
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