Thousands of Angolans abroad will be voting remotely for the first time in their country’s election next week.
About 14 million Angolans at home and abroad will head to the polls on August 24 to vote in what is likely to be high strung and the toughest the inception of multi-party election thirty years ago.
Civil society groups such as Movimento Mudei as well as scholars and opposition figures criticised previous elections as biased and not credible.
Not much has changed in terms of the transparency of the election since 2017. Senior lecturer in history at South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, Justin Pearce says the (ruling) MPLA has a propensity to falsify results. Officials of the MPLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It does not help that the government passed a law last year to centralise the final vote counting from all stations at home and abroad in the capital Luanda, a system that has raised concerns about electoral compliance, voter fraud since most local media are state-controlled.
Angola is Africa’s major oil producer but one of the continent’s most unequal nations. It emerged from civil war in 2002, a 27-year power struggle between former liberation movements, the MPLA, which reigned since Angola’s independence from Portugal in 1975, and UNITA.