THE ELECTIONS IN ANGOLA

Background

As you are aware, the last presidential elections and the election of deputies to the National Assembly took place in September 1992, fifteen years ago.

For reasons that are well known, there was a long period during which elections were suspended, but now they are going to be held again and the process has already begun.  It started with voter registration and 8,039,659 voters were registered in the country.  This is a provisional figure, according to the Inter-ministerial Commission for the Electoral Process.

With your permission, I will not speak here of that turbulent time, preferring to leave that to historians, sociologists and other specialists who will deal with it with more wisdom and in-depth analysis.

We want to cultivate a positive approach and live in the present.  Angola is currently experiencing an era of development for progress and the solution of many national problems.  The road to our development involves people, education, health, promoting a culture of citizenship, building facilities all over the country and improving the living conditions of people, of Angolans.  We have a country in construction, or in reconstruction, but the fact is that much still needs to be done for life to return to normal in such a big country as Angola.   We have started on that road and every day new things are being built and solution models found.   Only time will tell how effective and functional they are and what future they have.

For the development of political society, which is what I am going to deal with, there has to be a normal cycle of holding presidential and legislative elections every four or five years, in accordance with the norms set out in our Constitutional Law for the election of elective bodies.  The National Electoral Council, CNE, was established in 2005 to conduct that task of holding elections.

The National Electoral Council

Article 156 of Law No.6 2005, the Electoral Law, establishes the composition of the National Electoral Council as follows:

1. Two citizens indicated by the President of the Republic;
2. Six citizens appointed by the National Assembly by an absolute majority of serving deputies, on the proposal of parties with parliamentary seats, three from the majority coalition and three from other parties or coalitions;
3. A Supreme Court judge elected at a plenary meeting of the said Court;
4. A representative of the Ministry of Territorial Administration;
5. A member of the National Information Council elected by his or her peers.

The National Electoral Council has branches in the country’s eighteen provinces, the Provincial Electoral Commissions and the 164 Municipal Electoral Offices.  Each province had offices in every municipality.  Communal Electoral Offices will be established if need be, for example whenever a municipality has a large number of voters or is many kilometres away from the nearest municipality. 

CNE structures are being established everywhere in the country. We started by building facilities, that is, premises in all the country’s municipalities, which should in principle be completed by December this year.   Basically, we have structures in every province and municipality.

In the process of organising the establishment of the National Electoral Council we gave priority to training.  We created the conditions and provided a number of training courses.  The first were for trainers, in order to establish groups of trainers to go all over the country training people living in the provinces.

The courses for trainers included training people to work for the National Electoral Commission in the provinces, training geared to political parties, training geared to journalists and training geared to civil society.

In establishing our groups of trainers we involved civil society organisations and requested the cooperation of non-governmental organisations, and we included people from those organisations in our teams of trainers. 

Training for people working within the organisation - in the CNE, the Provincial Electoral Commissions and the Municipal Electoral Offices – was aimed at imparting knowledge of election material, namely, the electoral laws, voter registration, the electoral code of conduct, in short all the laws related to the electoral process, and preparing these people for the work they will do in the elections.  With respect to political parties, the training sought the dissemination, interpretation and understanding of the electoral legislation, based on requests for this by political parties, and I must say that there was massive participation by political parties.  The aim with journalists was also to familiarise them with the electoral legislation and the methods and ways of organising the election process, so that journalists would know the procedures and working methods used by the National Electoral Commission.  The aim with civil society was essentially the same.

Our training procedures were inclusive and participatory. They were inclusive because they included everyone, citizens, political parties, non-governmental organisations and civil society, and participatory because they also involved them all.

At the same time, we organised structures of the institution everywhere in the country – the CNE, the Provincial Electoral Commissions and the Municipal Electoral Offices – and we created the material, technical and instrumental conditions to make it possible to hold the elections.

Our task is to ensure that by the end of the year the National Electoral Commission has the structural, physical and human conditions to hold elections.

Voter registration

As is generally known, voter registration was carried out by the CIPE, the Inter-ministerial Commission for the Electoral Process, a Commission coordinated by the Ministry of Territorial Administration.  Voter registration was conducted by 509 brigades coordinated by Provincial Executive Commissions in every province in the country.    It started on 15 November 2005 and ended on 15 September, as a result of having been extended for three months, since it was to have ended on 15 June this year.

We admit that not all Angolans citizens with the right to vote have been registered, some because they abstained from registering and others for reasons beyond their control.  This was a foreseeable contingency that we do not regard as irregular.  The important thing is that it was possible to register the largest possible number of voters.

The registration of Angolans abroad

With regard to Angolan citizens who live abroad, the problem is different.  The diplomatic and consular missions of the Republic of Angola in many countries of the world have not registered all the Angolan citizens resident in the countries where they are.  The lack of precise data and knowledge of the number of Angolans living in different countries was the main reason why the National Electoral Commission agreed that Angolan citizens living abroad should not register.

The fact is that many Angolan citizens living abroad have not cultivated the habit of registering with their consulates, so that it is hard for the Angolan consular services to know how many citizens there are in the diáspora.  The government itself also admitted that it has not created the technical and material conditions to ensure the registration of citizens abroad.

All Angolan citizens in the diáspora have our full respect and consideration.  However, we could not make exceptions and decide to include the very few consular missions that guaranteed that they did have such data. 

These were the main reasons that led the CNE to decide against it, but we recommend to the government that every effort should be made to create the material and technical conditions in all diplomatic and consular missions to enable Angolan citizens to register, so as to make it possible for residents abroad to do so. 

Thank you for your attention.

António Carlos Pinto Caetano de Sousa
President of Angola’s National Electoral Commission