Angola on Tuesday launched a voter-education programme ahead of its first post-war polls due next year with the prime minister warning against foreigners being registered for the key election.
”We have to be careful that those who do not fulfil the conditions required by law to vote are not registered,” Prime Minister Fernando da Piedade Dias Dos Santos said, kicking off the campaign in the oil-rich nation.
”We must respect the law, which states that only Angolan nationals either living here or abroad have the right to be registered as voters,” he said.
”Otherwise the electoral process could be endangered,” the prime minister said, adding that the campaign would educate voters ”on the civic rights, especially to register for the ballot and then to vote”.
Voter registration for the first elections since the end of Angola’s 27-year civil war in 2002 is due to begin in November and end in June next year, the government said recently.
But there have been hints that registration could be extended until September next year, in which case the vote may only take place in 2008.
President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, in power since 1979, has pledged to stage the historic ballot before the end of next year but has not set a date, sparking repeated complaints from the opposition of dragging his feet.
Dos Santos (64) is yet to formally confirm whether he will seek a fresh mandate.
Angola, one of the largest and most-sparsely populated countries in Africa, spans an area of 1,2-million square kilometres and is home to 15-million people, of whom an estimated seven million are entitled to vote.
The civil war, which raged from 1975 to 2002, cost about 500 000 lives, displaced another half a million and caused, according to dos Santos, about $40-billion in economic damage. — Sapa-AFP