UNITA’s parallel vote count is progressing slowly, and while its leaders remain convinced they won Wednesday’s election, the numbers they released to reporters this Thursday afternoon still put the MPLA in the foreground, albeit by a marginal margin. more than 1% for UNITA.
When counting 39.8% of the final protocols of the polling stations (which include the combined results of all the polling stations), the Adalberto Costa Junior’s party count gave 47.99% of the MPLA against 46.89% for UNITA and victories in the same provinces as official table The National Electoral Commission distributes them: Luanda, Cabinda and Zaire.
“These values that we get with our speed will make our percentage go up overall,” Anastasio Sicato, a historical figure from the Galo Negro party, told PÚBLICO. If this is enough to give them victory, the UNITA leader says yes: “These are the signs that we have at the moment, let’s give it time, in another two days we will get the results.”
UNITA’s data collection has not kept up with the official count, which was accelerated this year by other electoral disputes when the CNE announced official results primaries on Thursday night, giving the MPLA a victory with 51.07% of the vote to 44.05%.
“The point is that we have to carry the weapons that we have. We had great difficulty in obtaining polling station protocols. He knows the size of this country,” the leader justified. “What we don’t want is to produce protocols. No, the protocols that we give are really true, ”he added.
Anastasio Sicato admitted that his party is ready to accept defeat if they come to this conclusion at the end of the parallel count: “the protocols are the same, what is normal is that we achieve the same results.”
“We should not accept the results because there were many violations, an illegitimate CNE chairman, rigged lists, people who voted twice, but despite all this, we have a positive attitude,” he said.
But UNITA did not give up, as it was convinced that the count in Luanda could still bring surprises. “The result in Luanda is outstanding,” and “we predict that this result can make up for some areas where we know we will lose and from there we can win,” Sikato said.
Even if this result is not enough to guarantee a victory at the national level this year, UNITA has a large electoral base in the province of Luanda – 62.59% against 33.31%, according to official tally; 66.33% against 30.87 in the still preliminary party count – five years before coming to power: “We have been growing since 2008, and from now until the next election we will not see a change in this trend.”
“We know that our population stands for freedom and democracy and has already realized that this one-party state does not contribute to the development of the country. With all this, we think that in the future the MPLA, winning under these conditions, will experience difficulties in staying in power much longer, ”he concluded.