Angola’s President Eduardo Dos Santos appears not be giving up easily in what seemingly has become a 2-man race or contest between himself and Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo to be crowned Africa’s longest serving leader.
Election Results
Last week Dos Santos was elected by way of a landslide victory to serve a further five-year term as President. Currently aged 70 and having already led the country for 33 years, Dos Santos will be 75 by the end of his tenure. Early reports indicate that Dos Santos’s MPLA party won about 70 per cent of the votes while the rest was split between opposing parties UNITA and CASA-CE. Although MPLA’s victory was overwhelming this time, it was not as decisive as the 2008 elections where it amassed about 81 per cent of the votes.
Questions and Protests
As we are all too aware, no elections held in Africa passes without controversy and problems. It therefore comes as no surprise that the validity of the elections have been challenged by the government’s opponents. Concerns have been raised over alleged rigged ballots and the transparency of the election process. In an interview with the Reuters news agency following the announcement of the provisional results, a candidate seeking election on the platform of the opposing CASA-CE party William Tonet denounced the elections as “cheating”. Tonet added that the election results amounted to a “declaration of war” by MPLA.
The leaders of the country’s second largest party UNITA have also voiced their intention to challenge the election results. Pre-election, observers will recall that the party’s leader Isaias Samakuva called for the postponement of the elections for another month as a result of what he termed interference in the election process by the ruling MPLA as well as questions raised over the credibility of the country’s national election commission (CNE).
Giant Leaps
The disquiet which has stemmed from the elections should however not detract from the progress, in gargantuan proportions, which the country has made since the end of its 27-year long civil war which devastated the nation. Now Africa’s second largest oil producing country, its oil wealth has served as the fulcrum of its economic transformation. It is reported that the country experienced an average of 15 percent growth in the period between 2002 and 2008. Further and even more impressive is the fact that Angola reported the world’s highest annual average GDP growth at 11 percent between 2001 and 2010.
Sound-off
Unsurprisingly and much like its oil producing African counterparts Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea the oil wealth has failed to trickle down to those who occupy the bottom strata of its 18 million strong population and as a result endemic corruption, patronage, nepotism and poverty thrive below the glamorous face of the country which is most encapsulated by its skyscraper thronged capital, Luanda.
Perhaps in a bid to address these concerns, Dos Santos ran a re-election campaign which had at its centre the promise to reduce poverty and inequality backed by a declaration to invest $17 billion in the country’s energy sector. At the risk of being labelled a cynic or a pessimist, critics of the Dos Santos government have good basis upon which to base their damning indictments of the administration, after all Dos Santos has already had three decades to lead the country to the promised land but all he has delivered, in spite of the considerable resources which the country is blessed, is a nation with enormous social and economic disparities which may only be checked by a change of administration.
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