Angola’s embattled opposition is widely expected to mount its biggest challenge yet to the ruling MPLA in the general election on Wednesday, 24 August. The poll is likely to be close and some analysts believe the opposition would win if it were a free and fair election.

But none believes the election will in fact be free and fair. So expect the partisan national election commission (CNE) to announce yet another MPLA victory in the days ahead.

President João Lourenço and his MPLA will confront their old foe Unita in the legislative elections, which will also decide if Lourenço gets a second term as president.

In effect, though, the MPLA will be competing with the United Patriotic Front (FPU), which comprises three parties: Unita, the Democratic Bloc (BD) and the Angolan Renaissance Party — Together for Angola (PRA-JA Servir Angola).

Unita supporters at a political rally in Luanda, Angola, on 22 August 2022. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Paulo Novais)

But because the constitutional court — also partisan — prevented the three parties from forming a coalition and refused to register Abel Chivukuvuku’s PRA-JA, the other two have thrown their weight behind Unita, which is now led by its dynamic new leader, Adalberto Costa Júnior.

He has placed prominent members of BD and PRA-JA high on Unita’s party list to signal to voters that Unita is representing not just itself, but the FPU.

Independent Angola analyst Paula Cristina Roque recently told The Guardian: “It is an existential election, and it is going to be a very tight race. If there were free and fair elections, there is no doubt the opposition would win, but the government is not going to allow that.”

Polling

Though election polling is not very advanced in Angola, one poll by the local firm Angobarometro in February suggested that only 28.43% of Angolans would vote for the MPLA versus about 70% for the combined opposition.

Another Angola analyst, historian Justin Pearce of Stellenbosch University, is not quite so sure. He believes the election will be very close, but will not say whether the opposition would win even a fair fight. He agrees that the question is rather academic anyway, as he has little doubt that the MPLA and its subordinate institutions like the CNE and the constitutional court are not about to hand Unita a victory, whatever happens.

Pearce noted in an interview with Daily Maverick that the authorities had already tried to influence the outcome, as the court denied registration to opposition parties and annulled the election of Costa as Unita leader, forcing the party to rerun its congress.

Unita supporters at a political rally in Luanda, Angola, on 22 August 2022. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Paulo Novais)

Low voter registration may also blunt the impact of the youth vote which is expected to favour Unita. More than 60% of the population is under 24. Pearce notes that for the first time, a new cohort will be voting who were not yet born in 2002 when Unita’s first leader, Jonas Savimbi, was killed in battle, ending the civil war.

This means the MPLA’s cachet as the party that brought peace to Angola is fading.

Unita’s popularity has been steadily rising. In 2017, it won only an official 28.68% of the national vote and Chivukuvuku’s then party, CASA-CE, got 9.45% — while the MPLA won 61.08%.

“Nevertheless, the result indicated a steady downward trend for the MPLA over the three post-war elections; the party gained 81% of the vote in 2008 and 72% in 2012,” Pearce, Didier Péclard and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira noted at the time in an article in the journal African Affairs.

The authors also noted that the MPLA lost its majority in Luanda and suggested that it was steadily becoming a rural party — like fellow former liberation movement governments in the region. The ANC and Zanu-PF both come to mind.

Pearce points out that since Costa’s ascent to Unita’s leadership — replacing Isaías Samakuva, a member of the old guard — he has expanded the party’s support. He says it has helped Unita that Costa is of mixed race — a group that has historically not been part of Unita’s Africanist constituency. 

The more urbane Costa has also helped Unita, which used to have a largely rural constituency, to steadily increase its vote in the cities too.

Visit Daily Maverick’s home page for more news, analysis and investigations

 Poverty and unemployment

Meanwhile, the MPLA’s major drawback for voters is that it has failed to make a major dent in the poverty and unemployment which still bedevil most Angolans. If anything, life has grown harder under Lourenço, though that could partly be blamed on the poor economy he inherited, the depressed oil price — a mainstay of Angola’s economy — and then Covid-19.

The World Bank says that between 2008-2009 and 2018-2019, the percentage of Angolans living below the national poverty line increased from 37% to 41%.

Much was expected of Lourenço when he took over in 2017 from José Eduardo dos Santos, who had been president since 1979 and who had made himself and his family fabulously wealthy at the expense of ordinary Angolans, while forcefully suppressing any challenges to his power.

The Dos Santos family

Though Lourenço promised better, he has mostly disappointed. He cracked down on corruption, but mostly only that of his political enemies, mainly the Dos Santos family. Most prominently, he fired Isabel dos Santos — daughter of the ex-president and reputed to be Africa’s richest woman — from her lucrative positions, including as head of the state oil company Sonangol. He also fired her brother Josée Filomeno dos Santos from his job as head of Angola’s sovereign wealth fund.

MPLA presidential candidate President João Lourenço at a political rally in Luanda, Angola, 20 August 2022. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Paulo Novais)

Pearce notes that Lourenço has allowed a little more political space for his opponents than Dos Santos did, but adds, “he is still using lethal force against demonstrators”.

The Dos Santos children have been extremely vocal in accusing Lourenço of pursuing a “witch-hunt” against them for political purposes. Daughter Tchizé dos Santos also accused him of cynically exploiting their father’s death, in Spain in July, by returning his body to Angola for burial just before the elections.

Some analysts believe the Dos Santos factor could be decisive in the election. But Pearce believes that while Lourenço’s attack on the Dos Santos financial interests may have bought him some initial credibility, this has faded as the president has failed to address the pressing issue of living standards. Pearce also doubts that the apparent reconciliation represented by the timely return of the ex-president’s body will have much political impact.

“The dissatisfaction with Lourenço does not translate into nostalgia for Dos Santos,” he observes.

National election commission

Pearce notes that after the 2017 elections, there were obvious flaws in the results the CNE released, including pre-empting a legal requirement that national results should be derived by adding up the provincial results as approved by each provincial election commission.

As Unita complained at the time, CNE started announcing provisional results before the provincial electoral commissions had even met. They pointed out that the provincial commissions had not met before the CNE began to announce nationally aggregated provisional results.

Unita presidential candidate Adalberto Costa Junior at a political rally in Luanda, Angola, on 22 August 2022. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Paulo Novais)

Unita and the other opposition parties launched a legal challenge to the results, but the constitutional court rejected this. Eventually, Unita and CASA-CE MPs took up their seats in Parliament anyway, much to the chagrin of civil society activists who felt they had thereby lent legitimacy to a fraud.

Pearce notes that there have been no significant changes under Lourenço, either in the CNE or in the constitutional court to suggest they would handle possible challenges to Wednesday’s election any differently. Both remain partisan instruments of the MPLA.

One big question about the 2022 election is how the opposition will react this time if they feel cheated again — and how the state might respond.

“Unita can certainly command large crowds in the street now,” Pearce says. “If Unita leadership, backed by civil society, organised demonstrations to protest against election fraud, they could get quite a large turnout.

“And then there’s no knowing how the police would react,” he warns. DM