Campaigning for Angola’s first parliamentary elections since the end of a nearly three-decade civil war officially begins on Tuesday, with concerns already being raised that the vote will not be fair.
The September 5 ballot will serve as a key test for President José Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in office since 1979, ahead of presidential elections planned for next year, though he has yet to confirm whether he will run.
His party, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), has been in power for 33 years, and messages praising government construction and social projects have been the only campaign posters
seen on the streets so far.
Photos of dos Santos and MPLA flags have also been placed throughout major towns in the country, where 70% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day despite Angola rivaling Nigeria as Africa’s largest oil producer.
”This is the MPLA propaganda machine at work,” said political analyst Ismael Mateus.
”MPLA has all the advantages. They have been in power for a long time, have all the machinery on their side, and they can show some work: roads were rehabilitated, bridges, schools, hospitals built.”
At a weekend rally even before official campaigning began, the MPLA promised to work to rebuild the country following the civil war that ended in 2002.
”We have initiated the process of national reconstruction throughout the country,” MPLA secretary general Juliao Mateus Paolo told supporters.
He repeated pledges by Dos Santos to build one million new houses across the country.
Dos Santos recently promised ”to run an election that will be exemplary to the world”.
The leader of the main opposition and former rebel movement Unita, Isaias Samakuva, pledged the country would avoid an electoral crisis similar to what occurred in fellow African nations Zimbabwe and Kenya.
The government is to provide just over a million United States dollars in campaign financing for each of the parties competing in the polls, but opposition groups said recently they are yet to see the money.
One said the amount would not go far in allowing them to campaign.
”These amounts are laughable,” said Joao Antonio of the opposition Party for Democratic Progress and National Alliance in Angola.
”I hope they will not give us the money only after the results of elections as they did in 1992,” said Filomeno Vieira Lopes, chairperson of the Front for Democracy party.
Western and African Union observers have been invited to monitor the elections, and the European Union has begun deploying a 90-member mission.
Ten parties and four coalitions have been cleared to compete in the polls, and beginning on Tuesday they will be allocated five minutes of television time per day and 10 minutes on the radio to get their
messages out.
A total of 5 198 candidates will contest 220 parliamentary seats, with more than eight million Angolans registered to vote.
The MPLA faces off against its rival the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) in the first ballot in 16 years.
The last polls, the country’s first multiparty elections, were held during a lull in fighting between Unita and government forces.
A first round of presidential elections took place at the same time but the second round was called off after the late Unita leader Jonas Savimbi alleged there had been widespread vote rigging.
His death in 2002 proved decisive in ending fighting which had claimed half a million lives since erupting in 1975, soon after independence from Portugal. – AFP
