Angola began registering voters for the first elections since a 30-year civil war on Wednesday as the opposition accused the government of preventing its representatives from monitoring the process.
President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has still to declare whether he will contest next year’s poll, was among the first to register his name at a primary school close to his official residence in downtown Luanda.
Dos Santos has pledged to stage the historic ballot before the end of next year but has not set a date, sparking repeated complaints from the Southern African country’s opposition that he is dragging his feet.
Although the start of registrations was designed to show the government’s intent to stage the ballot, the process is only being held initially in about a third of the municipalities scattered across the vast country.
Virgilio de Fontes Pereira, head of an inter-ministerial committee on the electoral process, acknowledged things were not running entirely smoothly.
”There have been some delays during the preparations for which we accept responsibility,” he told journalists.
Opposition parties — including the former rebel movement Unita, which fought the Luanda government until 2002 — were more explicit, saying their agents had been denied access to registration offices.
”With the exception of Moxico (a province in eastern Angola), our agents have not received their accreditation cards and have been unable to exercise any control over the process,” said Isaias Samakuva, the president of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita).
Amalia Pereira, leader of the smaller opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LPD), also expressed concerns that ”we have already seen violations on the part of the government”.
Virgilio de Fontes Pereira however said the opposition parties were also to blame.
”Many parties have failed to respect the procedures which have been laid down by law, that’s why we have not delivered the cards” for the monitors, he added.
The government says it has been logistically impossible to begin the registration process in more than 51 of the 157 municipalities.
The civil war that raged from before independence from Portugal in 1975 to 2002 cost about 500 000 lives, displaced another half-a-million people and devastated infrastructure.
To complicate matters further, an estimated eight million landmines remain dotted around the country as a legacy of the fighting between dos Santos’s People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola and Unita.
Angola, one of Africa’s largest and most sparsely populated countries, spans an area of 1,2-million square kilometers and is home to 15-million people, of whom an estimated seven million are entitled to vote.
The economy is experiencing a boom, mainly off the back of increased oil production, which has made it Africa’s second largest producer after Nigeria.
However, it remains wracked by poverty with 70% of the population earning less than $1 a day.
Elections organiser Pereira acknowledged that the entire process would take time but laid out target figures.
”We are aiming to register at least a million voters by December 15,” said Pereira. — AFP
