Hopes of democratic elections in Angola during the new year faded on Friday after warnings it would take many months to register voters in the vast, mine-strewn Southern African nation.
President Jose Eduardo dos Santos said he would not set an election date until after the registration and the approval of the Council of the Republic, a consultative organisation representing political parties and various civil society groups.
Dos Santos was speaking on Thursday night following the appointment of a National Electoral Commission, whose spokesperson, Adao de Almeida, estimated earlier this week that it would take about six months to register voters.
He said registration could not realistically start until after the end of the rainy season at the end of May or beginning of June.
Observers said this meant there was little likelihood of staging the elections in 2006 as had been expected.
The presidential and legislative elections would be the first since the end of the country’s 1975-2002 civil war.
Angola has an estimated seven million electors out of a population of about 15-million.
The electoral commission faces a massive logistical task in tallying the electors. Most Angolan towns and villages are inaccessible because of the destruction of roads during the civil war and the presence of between five and eight million
anti-personnel and anti-tank mines.
The commission has asked the government to supply it with information about the location of the mines and to carry out a mine-clearance operation.
Dos Santos’ ruling Movement for the Liberation of Angola has been in power since the country achieved independence from Portugal in 1975. It signed a peace deal in 2002 with the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, which has converted from rebel army to the main opposition political party.
Unita leader Isaias Samakuva has announced plans to run for the presidency.
Angola, which is sub-Saharan Africa’s second largest oil producer after Nigeria, is struggling to rebuild following the war that claimed about 500 000 lives, displaced another half a million and caused, according to dos Santos, about $40-billion in economic damage.
Elections were last held in Angola in September 1992 but a second round of voting was scrapped after Unita claimed widespread fraud, and the civil war resumed for another decade. – Sapa-AFP