Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos said on Wednesday it would be “difficult” to go ahead next year with plans to hold the country’s first general election since the end of its long-running civil war.
Dos Santos told a meeting of politicians and civil-society members that he expected the electoral registration process to be completed by June next year but many obstacles still lay in the way of the historic vote.
“If we take into account all the tasks which remain to be carried out, I think it will be difficult to meet the conditions needed to hold elections next year,” said dos Santos, who has been in power since 1979.
The elections were initially scheduled to be held this year in order to draw a line under a civil war that raged from the time of the former Portuguese colony’s independence in 1975 until 2002 and cost about 500Â 000 lives.
Opposition parties, including the former rebel Unita (National Union for the Total Independence for Angola) that fought the Luanda government until 2002, have consistently accused dos Santos of dragging his heels in a bid to extend his stay in office.
Dos Santos is already Africa’s fourth-longest serving leader and his Movement for the Liberation of Angola party has been in power since independence.
The 64-year-old has yet to announce whether he will stand for re-election but is widely expected to run again.
The president first announced in December 2004 that elections would be held in 2006 but the voter-registration process only started last month in less than a third of the country’s 157 municipalities.
However, dos Santos said on Wednesday the start of the registration process showed that the path towards elections had now been firmly set.
“With the registration of the voters, the electoral process has entered a decisive phase. We can consider this process as being irreversible,” he said.
The government says it has been logistically impossible to proceed with registrations in more provinces given the devastation to the infrastructure wrought by the war in which half a million people were displaced.
To complicate matters further, an estimated eight million landmines remain dotted around the country as a legacy of the fighting between dos Santos’s forces and Unita.
Angola, one of Africa’s largest and most sparsely populated countries, 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 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 about 70% of the population earning less than a dollar a day. — AFP