By John Ikani
President of Angola, João Lourenço has announced that the Southern African nation would hold general elections on August 24.
Lourenço announced the date on Friday before a consultative body that met to approve his proposed date for the polls.
Angola’s national legislation establishes the requirement to hear the opinion of the National Electoral Commission (CNE) and the Council, before the proposed date for general elections is approved.
The Council is composed of representatives of the Executive and Legislative powers, as well as the leaders of all political parties with seats in Parliament, among other institutions, whose meeting takes place at the Council of Ministers hall of the Presidential Palace in Luanda.
As Lourenço explained, the CNE reported on May 24 that the human, technical, material and financial conditions are in place to hold the elections.
Heritage Times (HT) gathered that even before the date of the ballot was revealed, electioneering had long gotten underway.
Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition UNITA party, Adalberto da Costa Júnior, decried what he called the unequal treatment accorded to political parties.
“The competitors in an electoral challenge do not have differentiated valences. The law puts them all in the same circumstances, so says our constitution, so say the laws. But as any serious and honest citizen evaluates, we are in a process of electoral approximation absolutely violating the laws,” he said.
An accusation that Rui Falcão Pinto de Andrade refutes. The member of the ruling party’s political bureau told Africanews that “the MPLA has shown organizational capacity”, while “the opposition sees phenomena that do not exist”.
João Lourenço was elected on August 23, 2017, and is seeking a second term. It will be the fifth time that Angolans go to the polls since 1992.
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