Unita to challenge Angolan vote

2008-09-06 21:16

Luanda - Polls in Luanda opened for a second day of voting Saturday but Angola's main opposition Unita party slammed the oil-rich country's first peacetime elections and said it would contest them.

"Unita has already contested this election. We will continue to voice our argument," the party's secretary-general Kamalata Numa said on their radio station.

"The first step is to raise our issues with the CNE (electoral commission) and later we will also involve the constitutional court on the unconstitutionality of the electoral process," Numa added on Saturday.

Alceides Sakala, head of the Unita's parliamentary group, told AFP: "As far as Luanda is concerned, it was a scandal, the way it was organised."

In Luanda many voters queued for a second day outside polling stations after the vote was extended into Saturday following Friday's chaotic start.

MPLA expected to win

The elections are widely expected to enable the ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) party of president Jose Eduardo dos Santos to retain its grip on power in Africa's leading oil-producing nation.

By midday voters in Luanda, which bore the brunt of Friday's electoral chaos, were still in line for the 320 polling stations that had re-opened to allow everybody to cast their votes.

The European Union observer mission who early on Friday had called the vote "a disaster" said its teams were out in Luanda again on Saturday.

"Our observers are going around having a look, some polling stations did not open as they were supposed to," the EU mission spokesperson Jutta Bangel told AFP, adding that it was too early to say how things were going.

In the poor Samba neighbourhood election officials were still waiting for ballot papers while hundreds of people waited in line on Saturday.

Waiting for hours

Forty-two year-old Natalia Antonio Manuel who returned home on Friday after waiting four hours in vain, was back in line on Saturday.

"I am happy that I will be able to vote but I would be even happier if the polling station opened and finally started working," she told AFP.

Still, she said she would be patient even if the organisation of the poll was "terrible."

In nearby Rocha Pinto dishevelled electoral officials, who told AFP they had slept in the polling stations to safeguard the ballot boxes after Friday's chaotic scenes, were already counting votes even though they had turned voters away on Friday because they ran out of ballot papers.

"It was a sacrifice but I did it... out of love for my country," a female official, who declined to be named, said.

One table, counting a little under 150 votes, said its end tally was 111 votes for the MPLA, 27 votes for Unita and four smaller parties won one vote each.

Unita, whose guerrillas fought the MPLA in a 27-year civil war following independence from Portugal in 1975, branded the election as unfair before it began, and accused the MPLA of misusing state funds and resources for campaigning.

On Friday Angolans turned out in force to vote for the first time since the end of the country's devastating 27-year civil war in 2002 that claimed 500 000 lives.

- AFP