Angola Elects — Issue #5
MPLA celebrates victory, Unita reserves judgement — for now
Welcome back to Zitamar’s Angola Elects newsletter. With almost all the votes now counted, the MPLA have been returned to power — albeit with a much reduced majority. For a brief summary of the state of play, see AP’s article this morning, by our correspondent Fernando Lima:
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In this issue:
💵 Electoral violence, but not the usual type
🗳 Unita supporters protest results
🥱 High abstention
💵 Electoral violence, but not the usual type
One of the impressive features on election day was the presence of delegates for all the parties, seated at a bench, usually in front of the voting table officers and the ballot box. Were they party activists, or just another “small job”? With protests erupting on Thursday in the city of Luanda it is now clear that those youngsters, mainly women, were promised pay and a food subsidy for their time, which in many cases was not delivered. Police were called to APN, FNLA and CASA-CE offices to disperse protesters. They were refusing to turn in their copies of the results sheets before being paid. They claim they were promised KZ30,000 (equivalent to $60). The counting process revealed that at many polling stations, the small parties did not get any votes, suggesting even the party delegates did not vote for the political group they signed for.
Angolan social media quickly filled with videos of police on the streets of Luanda opening fire on APN protestors (although it remains unclear whether they were using live rounds). Isabel dos Santos, daughter of the former president and vocal critic of President Lourenço, was quick to share the scenes, claiming they showed “protests about ‘controversial’ election results and the ‘early’ announcement of a win for MPLA”, before she was corrected by Angolan BBC and VOA journalist Israel Campos.
🗳 Unita supporters protest results
Along with the protests around payments, in some neighborhoods in Luanda, there were also protests disputing the election results. Since Unita achieved an overwhelming victory in Luanda, young voters in particular claiming the CNE’s results, giving overall victory to the MPLA, were false. These spontaneous protests will likely continue on a small scale in Luanda and other Unita strongholds like Benguela and Huambo, for the coming days. MPLA spokesperson Rui Falcão suggested last night Unita leadership should confront their supporters and tell them the outcome of this week's election.
Unita is treading carefully with regards to the election results being presented by CNE. In a press conference they admitted that, according to the 40% of results that they had analysed so far, the MPLA had a small lead over Unita, of 47.99% to 46.89%. But, the party said, as more data was still to come from Luanda, that result could still be reversed. Spokesperson Ruben Sicalo said they would base any claim on seeing results sheets, “since this is the attitude of a responsible party,” adding that “there is no room to create an environment of social convulsion, an agitated environment, something our adversaries have done all the time”.
In past electoral campaigns, the MPLA has been quick to associate Unita with the chaos of the civil war days, and imply that a vote for Unita was a vote to return to violence. Adalberto Costa Júnior has been very wary of this throughout his campaign, avoiding any indications of alignment with Angola’s growing youth protest movement. The Unita leadership has historically (and often unfairly) been blamed for any violence that occurs at their supporters’ street protests, hence the calls for calm from Ruben Sicalo. It is likely that Costa Júnior will opt to take the legal route to challenge these results, if that is something his party wishes to do, as opposed to calling for mass protests from their supporters. However, at the grassroots level, it is unclear how much influence Costa Júnior will have over Unita supporters who feel disenfranchised and wish to organise spontaneous street protests.
🥱 High abstention
One of the surprising features in the elections is the high abstention rate, of 54.34%. Anecdotally, polling stations looked very well attended, with turnout of around 50% of the 650-700 registered voters in each logbook, so it seems CNE should correct and update its electoral roll to remove duplicates and deceased voters. Of the 14,399,391 registered voters, only 6,574,762 actually cast a vote.
MPLA spokesperson Rui Falcão blamed the high abstention rate for the MPLA’s poor showing in Luanda. This is quite a characteristic lack of self-reflection for a senior MPLA politician, and is likely to further raise tensions as Unita and civil society groups continue to (slowly) carry out their parallel vote counts. At the time of writing, Movimento Cívico Mudei has Unita ahead of the MPLA by 52% to 43% nationwide, though they have only counted 184,735 votes so far.