DR Congo election panel may delay provisional results

Democratic Republic of Congo’s election commission may have to postpone publication of provisional results from the long-awaited presidential vote, the panel’s chairman told AFP today.

“We are working around the clock. We are doing our best to publish the results on January 6. But if we can’t, we can’t,” said Corneille Nangaa, head of the Independent National Election Commission (CENI).

DR Congo, which is sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest country and one of its most unstable, has been buffeted by political turbulence for the past two years.

President Joseph Kabila, 47, should have stepped down at the end of 2016 when his constitutionally-limited two terms in office expired.

But he invoked a caretaker clause in the constitution to stay on, sparking protests which were ruthlessly crushed, leaving scores dead.

After repeated delays, the long-awaited presidential election to chose his successor was held on Sunday.

Tensions have however risen over the marathon counting process with opposition fears running high that the result will be rigged to favour Kabila’s preferred successor Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary.

CENI had pledged to issue provisional results by January 6 — with the timetable confirmed by the commission on Tuesday.

Definitive results are due out on January 15, with the new president to be sworn in three days later.

Compiling the votes by hand was the biggest hurdle, Nangaa said.

Each electoral area is responsible for counting its own votes, then sending a report on the tally along with the actual ballots cast to a “result centralisation” centre which compiles all the data.

But the road network is notoriously poor in DR Congo, a vast country which is the size of continental western Europe.

CENI had installed electronic voting machines to speed up the ballot, with voters selecting their candidate via a touchscreen which would then print out the relevant ballot form.

That form would then be placed into the ballot box.

CENI had wanted “to be able to transmit the results from the voting machines to help us publish the results quickly but nobody wanted that procedure,” Nangaa said.

The opposition had fiercely criticised the machines, describing them as vulnerable to hacking and manipulation.

“As the machines are not connected to anything,” the business of collecting and collating the reports “is being done manually”, Nangaa said.

“We had proposed a solution” to overcome DRC’s infrastructure problems, he said, “but it was rejected, and now we have to live with the situation.”

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