Election workers facing high logistical hurdles counted just over two million votes in the first 11 days since The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) historic vote, according to the Independent Electoral Commission.
President Joseph Kabila held the lead in the presidential race, but the numbers were far from definitive, with only about 10% of ballots counted.
Kabila had about 48% of the 2 153 867 ballots counted so far, according to a report late on Thursday from the electoral commission. His main challenger, Vice-President and former rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba, had about 20%. The remaining votes were split among some of the 31 others on the presidential ballot.
In all, 80% of DRC’s 25-million registered voters — about 20 million people — cast ballots in the July 30 presidential and legislative election.
A preliminary countrywide tally is expected to be announced on August 20, and a final tally on August 31.
The vote-counting, like the election itself, has been a logistical challenge. Officials are hampered by poor roads and communications, with DRC’s infrastructure in tatters after years of colonial rule followed by corrupt dictatorship and then war.
The United Nations’s Radio Okapi reported on Thursday that electoral commission workers in canoes were still gathering ballots.
The results so far reflect a regional split, with Kabila, as expected, doing best in the east, where he was born. Bemba was doing well in western provinces. Bemba was expected to do particularly well in Kinshasa, the capital, but results from that western city had not yet been compiled.
With the field so crowded, no candidate is expected to win a majority in the initial round. If that is the case, a second round will be held between the top two vote-getters, probably in October.
Officials had at first said no partial results would be released, but backtracked because of the uncertainty fanned by competing camps making claims based on their own compilations from figures posted outside polling stations across the country.
Election officials this week began releasing results compiled by 62 electoral centres, with Thursday marking the first time the count went over one million.
Both Bemba and Azarias Ruberwa, another vice-president and former rebel leader running for president, have alleged fraud in the vote. Bemba has said he is leading Kabila in many parts of DRC.
Kabila was seen as the front-runner because many in DRC credit him with taking the initiative to end DRC’s 1996 to 2002 war by uniting warring rebels to form a transitional government that paved the way for the elections.
But some are also suspicious that he is being forced on them by the international community.
The mineral-rich nation the size of Western Europe has been roiled by wars and corrupt rule since 1960 independence from Belgium. DRC’s last multiparty vote for a leader was in 1961. The winner was killed and military regimes took power. — Sapa-AP