Yesterday I had breakfast with one of the European Union observers staying at my hotel. His face was devastated with fatigue. He’s been in the country since the beginning of August, working very hard (I’ve seen what they do – I can guarantee that this observation stuff is like daily triathlon) and from the day before the election until the time we sat together for coffee he hadn’t had any sleep. But he didn’t complaint at all. He did say he needed some rest, but he knows what gets him high and what he’ll return to in a few months’ time: election observing. Highly addictive.
When you land on an exceptional setting, where people are going through something unique, and you open yourself to that world, to register and process what you see, and you lose sleep, and skip meals, and fall off the rails of any kind of routine, and logistics are complicated, and you phone like a call center, you write, you edit, and it’s hot inside the car and you inhale smoke and loud music coming from the cab in front of you, and you talk to so many people and most of them are young and sprouting, and you contemplate so much waste, and you sit on a doorstep to rest for a while and a little boy stops by your side and says
- você és bonita
well, when these things combine, something pierces your entrails and exposes your flesh. And there’s a beautiful wound for the world to infect.
Elections had logistical problems. After speaking to one of the guys that worked in the organisation at communal level, I got the feeling that it was pure inexperience that caused it all. They accumulated problems and didn’t realize they couldn’t get them all solved before D-day. Since almost all polling stations functioned in tents, they couldn’t just leave the material there before someone arrived. But late and disorganised accreditation caused station members to ignore where they should be. This was the type of mechanism behind the nightmare. And Luanda was a bigger problem because it’s a chaotic city. The simple distribution of material through warehouses around town mobilized insane amounts of time and energy. This is what the guy told me, looking hopelessly at me through layers of fatigue and frustration. Perhaps the country didn’t have the necessary skills for such a huge task.
It’s hard to say how these events biased the results. But although nobody expected such a massive score for the government party, it is coherent with the reality we all saw. The party sustains all institutions. If you want to teach at the university, you have to at least pretend to be one of them. It works not so much in a logic of repression, but of give and take. You want this job? This house? Then sign in. The state media – private ones don’t exist outside Luanda – are anthologies of bootlicking prose. And 70% of Angolans are uneducated and very poor.
But as the opposition said, this is just one step in the democratic process. New elections will be held in 4 years, not 33. It’s true that the country is progressing in education and health issues. Let’s see what happens. How the opposition reorganises as well.
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