With 97% of the vote counted, the National Electoral Commission (CNE) provisionally announced that the MPLA had won 51.07% of the vote and the main opposition party Unita had 44.05%. This means MPLA president João Lourenço would win a second term, as the Angolan president is indirectly elected by parliament.

But the MPLA still took a big knock. In the last elections in 2017, the MPLA won 61.08% of the vote and Unita only 28.68%. And there have been widespread accusations of fraud by the CNE in Wednesday’s results, which Unita said it would challenge in court.

Even the CNE’s provisional results showed that Unita had swept the capital Luanda, winning almost 63% against the MPLA’s 33%. This confirmed a trend of the MPLA steadily becoming a largely rural party.

Claudia Gastrow, an Angola analyst at the University of Johannesburg, said Unita supporters were extremely concerned about the CNE presiding officers at many polling stations not posting the results for those stations at the stations. She said this seemed to be especially true in Luanda, where many young people backed Unita – in large part because of the popularity of its new young leader, Adalberto Costa Júnior.

She said the failure to post many polling stations’ results had partly frustrated the efforts of civil society organisations to conduct a parallel voter tabulation (PVT) of the results. PVTs are widely considered to be the most effective way for citizens to verify official results. But they of course depend on election officials observing the law by posting the individual polling station results.

The civic organisation Mudei nevertheless announced that its PVT showed that Unita had won with 54% to the MPLA’s 42%, nationally. Gastrow said opposition supporters were also suspicious that the CNE had held a press conference late on Wednesday and another early on Thursday to announce results – but had refused to take questions from journalists.

Justin Pearce, an Angola analyst at Stellenbosch University, said: “The fact that the CNE started announcing provisional results so soon, and without any documentary evidence, is clearly highly suspicious.”

He also found it worrying that some polling stations had not posted results and that journalists had been unable to ask questions at the press conferences.

However, Pearce still felt that the efforts by activists to construct a parallel count on the basis of results posted by polling stations “seems to be more widespread and systematic this time around – thus a firmer base of documentary evidence in the event of a challenge”.

Pearce had predicted that Unita would do well in Luanda. Once a largely rural party, Unita has recently grown its urban support greatly, helped by the urbane image of its new leader Costa.

The leader of UNITA Adalberto da Costa Junior poll his ballots in the general elections at a polling station in Luanda, Angola, 24 August 2022. Nearly 14.4 million Angolans are being called to vote in general elections, a process that the opposition considers lacking transparency, but that the government considers exemplary. The general elections will define the composition of parliament and party leader with majority of votes will become the president. EPA-EFE/AMPE ROGERIO

Though Unita was the name on the ballots, Lourenço and the MPLA were effectively also competing with a coalition of three parties under the banner of the United Patriotic Front (FPU), namely Unita, the Democratic Bloc (BD) and the Angolan Renaissance Party – Together for Angola (PRA-JA Servir Angola). 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.

Unita’s leader Costa 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 also the FPU. This tactic appeared to have worked.

Pearce had noted before the poll that low voter registration might also blunt the impact of the youth vote, which was expected to favour Unita. He had said that, for the first time, a new cohort would 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 meant the MPLA’s cachet as the party that brought peace to Angola was fading. Pearce points out that since Costa’s ascent to Unita’s leadership – replacing Isaías Samakuva, a member of the old guard – he had considerably 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. Costa has also helped Unita, which used to have a largely rural constituency, to steadily increase its vote in the cities too.

Meanwhile, the MPLA’s main drawback for voters remained that it has failed to make a major dent in the poverty and unemployment that 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 and then Covid-19.

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.

Supporters of People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) leader and Angolan President Joao Lourenco attend a political campaign meeting in Kilamba pavilion in Luanda, Angola, 22 August 2022. Angola will vote on 24 August to choose a new President of the Republic and new representatives in the national parliament. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Ampe Rogerio)

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.

UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) supporters during a political rally in Luanda, Angola, 22 August 2022. Angola will hold general elections on August 24, which will define the composition of parliament and the names of the President and Vice President of the Republic. (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 the CASA-CE coalition 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 of the CNE and its procedures or the courts under Lourenço to suggest they would handle possible challenges to Wednesday’s election any differently. Both remain partisan instruments of the MPLA. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R25.