The impoverished West African nation of Benin was counting votes on Monday after the first round of its presidential election dragged on late into the night under the shadow of fraud claims.
Polling, which had been due to end at 4pm on Sunday, was prolonged until past midnight in some areas because of logistical problems and what the head of the electoral commission described as a ”massive turnout”.
”The last polling stations have closed, the process of centralising the votes is underway,” Sylvain Nouwatin told reporters, promising to ”declare the results on time, and with transparency”.
Whatever the result of the election, it theoretically marks the end of the long career of 72-year-old President Mathieu Kerekou, a former Marxist dictator turned elected president, who has led Benin for 30 out of the past 34 years.
Benin’s Constitution, under which the country inaugurated multi-party politics in 1990, bars anyone older than 70 from standing for election, leaving 26 hopefuls to jostle for Kerekou’s job.
But the veteran leader might not be quite finished just yet.
He has not publicly endorsed any of the 16 as a possible successor and on Sunday, after casting his ballot, he warned that he might have to stay on for a few months if, as he expected, the vote was marred by fraud.
”The elections, which we had hoped would be transparent, will not be. You know this. The candidates know this yet say nothing, and those running the election aren’t saying anything either,” he told reporters.
”It will never be said that Benin organised a presidential election in the shadows … If necessary it will take three or four months to check the results, like in the United States,” he said, after voting in Cotonou.
Nouwatin said voting was brisk around the country, and an Agence France-Presse reporter who visited a dozen polling stations in the capital Porto Novo found that more than 70% of registered voters had cast ballots by mid-afternoon on Sunday.
Some polling stations opened late, but central election officials ordered those in Cotonou to stay open after the scheduled time in order to give voters a full nine hours to take part.
Nouwatin said he could not give details on the exact turnout figure or estimates of the results as a new centralised vote-counting system forbade this.
Many voters said corruption and the collapse of the country’s economy were the main issues.
In theory, if none of the candidates wins a clear majority in Sunday’s vote, the two front-runners will face a run-off in two weeks time, but one candidate has already threatened to go to court over rigging allegations.
The campaign director for Yayi Boni, the former head of the West African Development Bank, complained of ”irregularities, missing voting materials, late opening of polling stations and inflated voter lists”.
Sunday’s election is the fourth since Benin brought in multi-party rule in 1990, but the country has never held such a complex poll. A record 4 021 626 voters have been registered, some of them fraudulently, candidates claim.
About 60 observers from the Economic Community of West African States have been deployed to monitor the election.
With Kerekou out of the running ”the game, more than ever before, is open,” said political scientist Jean-Paul Amoussou.
There are, nevertheless, a couple of frontrunners.
In the first round of the 2001 poll, former national assembly president Adrien Houngbedji came third, with 12,62% of votes, and senior official Bruno Amoussou came fourth, with 8,59%.
Both have high hopes of making the cut and going on to the second-round run-off, but they will face competition from Boni, a respected outsider. – Sapa-AFP