Mali’s opposition vowed on Tuesday to challenge a weekend election that appears to have handed a new five-year mandate to incumbent President Amadou Toumani Touré.
”We will take appeal to the Constitutional Court to have the cancellation and rerun of this election,” said Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga, one of the candidates fielded by a leading opposition coalition.
”The conditions under which the elections took place render the results null and void,” he asserted, claiming that the poll was marred by fraud.
Touré, a 58-year-old former general who is unaffiliated but enjoys the backing of two large coalitions and myriad small parties, is seen as leading in a count of ballots from Sunday’s election.
”Our candidate has more than 70% of the votes in about 60% of the polling stations in the country; that outcome is undisputable,” said Mountaga Tall, one of the leaders of the coalition backing Touré, the Alliance for Democracy and Progress.
Touré’s spokesperson Hassan Barry on Monday claimed the president had won a second term. Full official election results are expected on Wednesday or Thursday.
Observers from the Economic Community of West African States and OIF, the organisation of French speaking countries, have cleared the vote as being overall fair and clean, despite isolated incidents of concern.
But the opposition Front for Democracy and the Republic, a coalition of 16 parties that fielded four candidates, including ex-prime minister Ibrahim Keita, has dismissed the entire vote as a sham. It cited multiple voting and intimidation of voters, unserialised ballot papers bearing no serial numbers or security watermarks.
”Intimidations, open threats, tampering with figures — all was done to ensure Touré’s re-election,” claimed Keita.
The opposition coalition has walked out on the voter-validation process after being prevented from validating results in the capital.
A spokesperson for the group, Djiguiba Keita, said the coalition’s pull-out was final because results from six districts of the capital, Bamako, were ”released without our final authorisation”.
Those results showed Touré ahead of Keita, confounding pre-election predictions.
The opposition assertions tarnished the political consensus the vast West African country, long praised for its democracy, has enjoyed for the past 15 years.
Touré, who ousted dictator Moussa Traore in 1991, installed a multiparty system before stepping aside in 1992. He later stood for presidential elections and won easily in 2002.
A total of eight candidates had been vying for the top job in one of Africa’s most impoverished countries. — Sapa-AFP