OWN CORRESPONDENT, Mbabane | Sunday 7.30pm.
SWAZILAND’S general election ended at 5:00pm on Saturday, after being suspended eight days ago when rain prevented many voters from casting their ballots.
Votes cast during the quiet and generally slow day of voting will be counted with those from October 16. The results will be released “before the end of the week,” chief electoral officer Robert Thwala said on Sunday. Ballot counting started Sunday at 9.00am and initially a result the same afternoon. However at a press conference in Lobamba, the seat of the kingdom’s parliament about 15km south of the capital, Mbabane, Thwala said only that by 3.00pm results had been collected from 30 of 53 constituencies. Thwala also confirmed that about 200,000 people, from a population of less than one million, had registered for the vote. This is a roughly 30 percent drop from the last election in 1993, when about 284,000 people registered. The election is not expected to bring any major change as political parties have been banned in the kingdom since 1973. Candidates, nominated in local chiefdoms, can only stand as individuals and not on a political platform.
Nonetheless about 1,000 people, mostly members of opposition political parties and trade unions, gathered in the capital Mbabane for the funeral of a leader from the anti-government Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions.
Plans to turn the funeral into a mass political rally were abandoned at the request of the family of Mxolisi Mbatha, the SFTU treasurer who died last week, and the crowd only sang traditional songs. — AFP
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