Angola: Elections and the emergence of civil society

(Vatican Radio) Angolans voted on Friday in parliamentary and presidential elections expected to keep President Jose Eduardo dos Santos at the helm of Africa's No. 2 oil producer, but the long-serving leader faces swelling popular pressure to share the nation's riches more evenly.

“Between the last elections [2008 –ed]and this years the situation has changes drastically” says Jon Schubert, of the Centre for Africa Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Listen to his interview with Emer McCarthy:

“The last elections were overshadowed by the experience of the civil war. No-one, from the population or opposition parties challenges the result of those. Since last year there has been an emergence of a civil society that hadn’t been there before. That is a non party-affiliated youth movement that started protesting for the benefits of peace that the MPLA kept promising”.

“They aren’t stupid they know that Angola is one of the biggest oil producer in Africa and they are wondering where that money is disappearing while they are still living in shanty towns with no running water, no electricity and they have to bribe their way into university”.

Dos Santos' ruling MPLA is expected to win comfortably at the expense of smaller and weaker opposition parties, extending the president's nearly 33 years in power which make him Africa's second longest serving leader after Equatorial Guinea's President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

Schubert who is also a risk forecaster for the London based company Exclusive Analysis, adds that the MPLA's hold on the state and its control of most local media gave it clear advantages over the opposition parties.

But many ordinary Angolans are unhappy about the unequal distribution of their country's oil wealth and this may be reflected in the size of the MPLA victory or the voter turnout.

Around 9.7 million Angolans are registered to vote at more than 10,000 polling stations. The election will appoint 220 lawmakers, and the leader of the winning party automatically becomes president for a five-year term.

It is only the third national election since Angola won independence from Portugal in 1975, and the second since the end a decade ago of a 27-year civil war whose scars can still be seen in damaged buildings and land mine victims.

The month-long campaign was generally peaceful, marred only by an incident on Thursday in which police detained a dozen members of the CASA-CE opposition party when they tried to enter the national elections commission to demand credentials to observe the vote.

Observers from the Southern African Development Community, the African Union and the Community of Portuguese-Speaking States, of which Angola is a member, will witness the elections.

But there are no formal observer missions from the European Union or the United States, both major importers of Angola's oil along with China.