A cross-party committee chaired by President Jose Eduardo dos Santos proposed that legislative elections take place in Angola in 2008 and a presidential vote in 2009, officials said on Thursday.
Both elections had been expected to be held next year but the Council of the Republic, a cross-party group that also includes representatives from civil society groups, unanimously agreed on a new timeframe at a meeting on Wednesday night, according to a statement from the committee.
”The Council of the Republic unanimously agreed that the legislative elections would take place between May and August in 2008 and the presidential poll should be held in the following year in the same period,” it said.
Augusto Carneiro, who is the country’s attorney general, was quoted by the state Angop news agency as justifying the delay on the grounds that an ongoing process to register voters would not be completed until June of next year.
The new voter roll would then have to be approved by the national electoral commission and allow time for appeals as well as a subsequent update, he added.
The committee’s proposal will need to be approved by Parliament but the vote is likely to be a formality given the majority enjoyed by his Movement for the Liberation of Angola party.
If the presidential election does not take place until 2009, it will mean Dos Santos will have ruled the Southern African country for 30 years.
The 64-year-old is already Africa’s fourth-longest serving ruler and was at the helm through most of the 27-year civil war that erupted when the former Portuguese colony gained independence in 1975.
The president first announced in December 2004 that national 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.
It had been thought that the parliamentary and presidential elections would take place at the same time.
However, Dos Santos hinted at a further delay during an address in Luanda on Wednesday by saying it would be ”difficult” to hold national elections in 2007.
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.
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. — Sapa-AFP