Angolan president defers democracy
Talk about a false dawn. Angola’s President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has cancelled the nation's first post-war presidential election. The ruling Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola won more than 80% of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2008, with Dos Santos promising presidential elections this year. The party has been in power since Angola's independence in 1975, fighting a 27-year civil war that only ended in 2002. Dos Santos has been president since 1979. Now he says the people of the oil-rich country will have to wait at least another three years, because he wants the government to serve its four-year mandate until 2012. Dos Santo’s announcement coincided with the MPLA saying it would now approve a new constitution that allows for a single presidential and parliamentary election. It looks like the apparatchiks have been pocketing so much oil wealth that they can’t stand the idea of democracy. Read more: Reuters, BBC
