Deep in the forest of Cabinda, Angola's oil-rich northern exclave, European Union election observers found an extraordinary sight. "We were half an hour up a track, looking like it was the middle of nowhere. And in the middle of clearing there was a massive camp," said Richard Howitt, a member of the European Parliament for Britain's Labour Party.
Hundreds of people were being sheltered, fed and entertained in marquees at the site, as they voted in the country's first election in 16 years. They told Mr Howitt they had been bused in from across the border in neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville. The province, which is estimated to produce more than half of Angola's multibillion-dollar oil revenues, has long been home to separatist sentiment. Although the voters told Mr Howitt they were Angolan, he said: "The real issue is we received direct, hard, incontrovertible evidence that government resources were used to bus people in. There's no doubt the only party symbols on show were MPLA."
The Communist Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola has ruled the country since 1975, winning a brutal civil war against Unita, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, that finally ended in 2002. A few days after polling, the election commission announced a landslide victory for the MPLA, with provisional final results giving it 81.76 per cent of the vote, and Unita, the biggest opposition party, in a distant second place with a mere 10.36 per cent.
For a contested election, it was an overwhelming margin and illustrates the difficulties opposition parties still face unseating sitting governments in Africa, where changes of power at the ballot box remain a rarity, particularly in those countries home to the continent's fabled resource wealth. Angola is the largest oil exporter in sub-Saharan Africa, with around one-third of its production going to the United States and a quarter to China.
Unita initially threatened to reject the election results - when it did so in 1992, the civil war restarted - but after the election commission dismissed its complaints, it withdrew its objections. MPLA officials reject any accusations of impropriety. "The results are in line with our expectations," Norberto dos Santos, the party spokesman, told the state-owned Jornal de Angola newspaper, which headlined its report of the results: "MPLA eliminates the competition".
"In every neighbourhood, in every village, our supporters are there nearly every day like a priest at a Sunday service," he said. In a preliminary report, the EU observer mission praised the process as peaceful and the counting as transparent, adding: "The election campaign has been carried out in a calm and orderly manner. Freedoms of assembly and expression have been widely respected." But it also pointed out that the playing field between the parties was not level, access to state resources was biased and unbalanced in the MPLA's favour, and campaign coverage in the state media was "generally biased in favour of the ruling party".
"I think the vast majority of people went to vote freely, but it can't be said to be free and fair," Mr Howitt said. "Very serious and profound flaws have been presented in the election process. We want to protect the peace process, but in the interests of multiparty democracy we have to be clear and speak out." Nonetheless, the official EU mission document - which does not pronounce on the freedom and fairness of the election - could hardly be described as hard-hitting.
Lara Pawson, an Angola specialist and writing fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, said: "From all the indications that I have got from people on the ground and my experience, these elections have not been free and fair, and I think it's extraordinary what the observers have been saying. "Angola is a massive oil-producing state. I think if these elections had taken place in Zimbabwe, we would have been saying they were not free and fair. It's not a surprise because Angola has got so much resources people's eyes are popping out of their heads at the sight of so much oil."
Citing Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, two other resource-rich states in the region, she added: "The international community is very happy to keep quiet while their rulers stay in power. That's a serious threat to opposition politics in Africa, and I think that has been revealed in this election." Ernesto Joaquim Mulatto, Unita's vice president, added: "The international community can't say 'in Africa as long as there's stability and we can take our petrol and diamonds it's OK'."
His party has been left with a tough challenge, despite Angola's glaring inequalities and widespread allegations of corruption, if it is ever to take power. But Mr Mulatto remained optimistic. "No matter how long, no matter where the government or party, everything that's started grows up and dies. Nothing is permanent, no institution is permanent, no government is permanent," he said, citing the collapse of the Soviet Union. "I continue to be hopeful for change in our country one day."
Even so, the process is likely to take decades, possibly generations. Ivor Jenkins, director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, said: "You can't underestimate the liberation and the liberation figure in all of these countries, particularly in first-time elections." While Zambia, Kenya and, possibly, Zimbabwe had seen change at the ballot box, he said, resource wealth tended to delay the process, not least because of its capacity to engender western interests.
"One has to go through the first three or four or five elections before things will normalise in terms of western-type democracies." sberger@thenational.ae
