A mammoth vote count was in swing in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday after the war-ravaged country’s first free elections in 46 years.
Current President Joseph Kabila is the favourite to win but the DRC, and neighbours with vast vested interests, will have to wait until August 31 for the result of Sunday’s first-round vote.
A second round, if one is needed, will take place on October 29, electoral commission chief Apollinaire Malu Malu said after polls closed in a vote that surprised observers by its extensive turnout in a peaceful atmosphere.
Millions of voters who have never known democracy streamed to the polls in the equatorial state, roughly as big as Western Europe, where the only proper roads run between its mining towns.
The United Nations on Sunday called the election, in which voters also picked a 500-seat Parliament, a logistical ”miracle”.
Voting was due to be completed on Monday around the central mining town of Mbuyi-Maji where polling stations were torched by boycotters, in the only known violence on Sunday.
The question is whether Kabila, or one of his rivals like former rebel boss Jean-Pierre Bemba, will claim an outright victory to eliminate the need for a second round and whether peace will hold between them.
At 35, Kabila is Africa’s youngest head of state and few thought he would survive. But he has won over the DRC and Western leaders, holding together complex peace deals in the aftermath of a conflict dubbed ”Africa’s World War”.
It sucked in seven neighbours, claimed millions of lives and turned the DRC into the running sore at the heart of the continent.
”The people were worn out by this war. There was no way to make money, no schools,” a teacher, Dieudonne Baroki, summed up the situation after voting in the eastern town of Rutshuru.
”I trust Kabila because he has tried to bring peace to all the country … I think he will take the first round.”
A truce was signed on the eve of the vote with one of the rebel groups still fighting in the east near the border with Rwanda, which is watching the outcome of the vote closely after deposing two leaders in the DRC in the 1990s.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame helped rebels first topple Mobutu Sese Seko, a dandyish dictator who made the country a byword for corruption, and then Kabila’s father, Laurent.
The reason was their failure to flush out Hutu killers who were hiding in the eastern DRC after carrying out the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
Kabila has managed to make peace with Kagame since he succeeded his assassinated father in 2001.
On Sunday, voters in the former Rwandan-controlled eastern capital of Goma stood happily in queues and pored over ballot papers, as big as newspapers, holding hundreds of names and photographs.
”This is truly a cause for much joy. I’ve never voted in my whole life,” said Jerome Amza (45).
The international community, which funded the elections in an amount of almost half a billion dollars, is hoping the vote will not only bring stability to Central Africa but also revive the DRC’s ruined economy.
The country has vast natural wealth, which has routinely been plundered by foreigners since it became a Belgian colony in 1908.
Independence was declared in 1960 just after the country’s last free elections.
These were won by Patrice Lumumba, a charismatic intellectual mistrusted by the West for his communist leanings.
He was rapidly deposed by Mobutu, who for the next three decades filtered the country’s diamond money to cronies and Swiss bank accounts.
After the war broke out, diamonds and coltan were freely looted by fighters on all sides while the population sank deeper into dire poverty. Most still live on about a dollar a day. — Sapa-AFP