At about 6am, I arrived in Cazenda (Luanda suburbs) and chose a neighbourhood where 4 polling stations were installed in tents by the road. About 200 people were already queuing. Pitch dark – there is no public lighting here. At 7am, when polls should start working, everything was missing. No lists of voters. Not enough bulletins! No PDA computers, the ones the electoral commission had been boasting about for weeks, the very cool system allowing voters to present themselves anywhere in the district, regardless of the station they were registered at. One of the stations had simply been forgotten: no material, no workers. People were eager to vote, and that’s why they were queuing since dawn and kept arriving. Five hundred. Six hundred. 8am. 9am. Nobody new what was going on. The polling station people were either sitting down looking clueless or running in all directions like Rosalino, a guy that hadn’t had any sleep for three nights because he was so involved in all the preparations. On the phone, I kept getting news about other polling stations where either the urns hadn’t arrived, or the ink used to mark the finger of those who voted was missing… Women carrying children, in the heat, for hours on end… and really, really, people were so calm and orderly despite the mess that they gave everyone a lesson of civic behaviour. And the participation was amazingly high.
The bulk of the mess was Luanda and its suburbs. Stations that never opened. Stations that opened at 4pm. Stations that opened after closing time, where people could vote by candlelight. Stations that opened at 11, closed two hours later and waited for new bulletins that never came. Members guarding urns until midnight, after spending a whole day with no food, because they had no information on how to proceed. People counting votes with the sole light of their mobile phones. Where I spent the morning, they opened the stations without the lists of voters and noted their name and number down on a piece of paper. Others didn’t even do that.
The electoral commission decided to extend elections in Luanda for another day. They said only the stations that never opened will be on. I’ve already been told that the logistical problems continue. Still no bulletins, etc etc. They completely lost control.
There are very few people on the streets to vote. I do believe that most people did vote yesterday. But it’s hard to say how this logistic mess affected the whole process. Can they really say what province the votes come from? Because a voter registered in Cabinda may have voted in Luanda. And that would be ok if they could keep a decent record. But I don’t think they did. And the attribution of Parliament seats depends on that.
The largest opposition party, UNITA, already asked for the impugnation of elections in Luanda. Others may follow.
These elections were set to be “a model for Africa”. How far that all seems now. The government spent 650 million dollars on this process. All the material was here and ready to use two months ago. No explanation on what the hell happened has been given. Nobody assumed responsibility for the mess. And in the good old Angolan tradition of opacity, probably nobody ever will.
Was this an engineered failure, as some suggest?
I’m going out to check the streets now.
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