First provisional results indicate MPLA wins Angolas election

Provisional results from vote counting in Angola’s general election indicate the ruling party MPLA, which has been in power for nearly five decades, holds a strong lead over the main opposition party, the National Electoral Commission (CNE) said on Thursday.

With 33% of the votes counted, CNE said the first provisional results showed the MPLA, led since 2017 by President Joao Lourenço, who is seeking a second five-year term, garnered 60.65% of the vote, and UNITA got 33.85%.

Since independence from Portugal in 1975, Angola has been run by the MPLA. Political analysts believed UNITA had its best-ever chance of victory yet as millions of youth left out of its oil-fuelled booms were likely to express frustration with nearly five decades of MPLA rule.

Abel Chivukuvuku, UNITA’s vice-presidential candidate, said the provisional results were not reliable and the party would publish its own based on a parallel vote count using the same data as the CNE.

Angola is Africa’s second biggest oil producer, but as with many poor nations sitting on oil wealth, decades of pumping billions of barrels of crude has done little for most except jack up the cost of living.

Half of Angolans live in poverty and more than half of under-25s are unemployed. In the capital Luanda, one of the world’s most expensive cities, jobless people ply petty trade in trash-strewn streets overshadowed by skyscrapers.

The electoral commission earlier said there had been no disturbances that could jeopardise the process.
Tweaked vote-counting rules were expected to delay official results by days, analysts had said. The announcement of the provisional results was not expected so soon.