VOTER turnout was low on Sunday in the Malian election for a successor to outgoing President Alpha Oumar Konare, the west African country’s first democratic transition since independence in 1960.
The government had appealed to voters to cast their ballots in force in the run-off election but it appeared many Malians had failed to respond to that call, similar to the first round on April 28.
Then, less than four in ten voters of Mali’s 5.7 million-strong electorate took part. But local officials said Sunday’s voting had so far gone smoothly and without any apparent irregularities.
The US-based Carter Centre had cited a “significant number of irregularities” in the first round, with nearly a quarter of votes declared invalid by the Constitutional Court.
Konare said he hoped the “lessons of the first vote in the last two weeks” would ensure proper scrutiny and transparency.
The run-off pits Amadou Toumani Toure, who led Mali during a transition period after an armed insurrection that ousted long-time dictator Moussa Traore in March 1991, against ruling party candidate Soumaila Cisse.
Konare is stepping down after serving the maximum two five-year terms allowed by a 1992 constitution.
A coalition led by ex-prime minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keita endorsed Toure for Sunday’s second-round run-off, even though Keita had lodged a formal complaint after coming in third with nearly 21 percent in the first round.
Toure (53) led the poll with 28%, followed by Cisse from the ruling Alliance for Democracy in Mali (Adema), who came away with nearly 23%.
Cisse said Friday he was “confident” of winning on Sunday because several members of Keita’s coalition had told him they would not follow the call to vote for Toure.
However the 52-year-old former finance minister, who was the environment minister when he was named Adema’s candidate to replace Konare, said on Saturday he felt betrayed by his supporters after it emerged that the outgoing president favours Toure in the vote.
Toure, Cisse and Keita, who shared more than one million votes in the first round, left another 21 contenders in the dust, none of whom garnered more than four percent of the vote.
Following petitions by several candidates, the Constitutional Court threw out more than half a million ballots, citing polling irregularities, but court president Abdourahmane Baba Toure said they were not enough to annul the results.
He then headed the so-called transitional committee that ran the country from 1991 until an election in 1992, when Konare became Mali’s first democratically elected president.
Konare steps down with a track record that is much more democratic than those of many of his peers on the continent.
But many Malians are critical of his performance in a country where poverty is rife and hunger ever-present.
Others complain of the failure of the education system, marked by a decade of strikes, poorly-trained teachers and falling standards. ? AFP