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Republic of Congo security forces voted on Wednesday ahead of presidential elections in which veteran leader Denis Sassou Nguesso is the leader.
A polling station has opened in the southern town of Dolisie, AFP journalists saw, where 1,203 soldiers, police and gendarmes were to vote – a civic duty in this country.
Also called Congo-Brazzaville, the republic is an oil-rich but also poverty-stricken neighbor of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Sassou Nguesso, a candidate for a fourth term, is a retired 77-year-old general who first ruled from 1979 to 1992 before returning at the end of a civil war in 1997.
Henri Bouka, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), said there were between 55,000 and 60,000 votes cast across the country.
“This early vote by the security forces is a test that we are trying. Other African countries are already doing it,” Bouka told AFP.
Opposition groups criticized the decision to separate the security forces’ vote from the general public, seeing it as an additional risk of electoral fraud.
Congo’s influential Catholic Church, which has expressed “serious reservations” about the transparency and credibility of the vote, has demanded that its election observers receive accreditation.
But the accreditation authority said it was “not possible … to give a positive response” to the request.
Congo. By Aude GENET (AFP) In 2015, the country held a referendum on removing a 70-year age limit and banning presidents from serving more than two terms.
This decision paved the way for Sassou Nguesso to obtain a third term in the blood-marred March 2016 elections.
His rivals, former General Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and former Minister André Okombi Salissa, contested the results.
They were arrested, brought to justice and each sentenced to 20 years in prison for endangering state security.
Sassou Nguesso will face seven challengers on Sunday, including Mathias Dzon, a 73-year-old former finance minister who was a finalist in 2016.
The largest opposition group, the Pan African Union for Social Democracy (UPADS), has already announced it will boycott the vote.
Another major figure, Frédéric Bintsamou, a former rebel leader who took up arms against Sassou Nguesso after the 2016 vote, called for a peaceful ballot.
Bintsamou, also known as Pastor Ntumi, told reporters that his party, the National Council of Republicans (CNR), would not present or support any candidate.
The elections “should not be the occasion to stir up the old demons of the division,” Bintsamou told reporters on Saturday.
Just over 2.5 million people are registered to vote in an estimated population of five million.
‘Masquerade’
One of Congo’s most respected writers, Emmanuel Dongala, who lives in the United States, has criticized the fairness and transparency of the vote.
Review: Emmanuel Dongala, photographed in Lyon, France, in 2012. By PHILIPPE MERLE (AFP) “It won’t be an election but a masquerade,” Dongala, a trained chemist whose novels include “Johnny Mad Dog,” said of boys inducted into the Liberian Civil War.
“Everyone already knows the name of the winner: Denis Sassou Nguesso,” he told AFP.
“I bet he will give himself the victory in the first round, with a score between 60 and 70 percent.”
Mambou Aimee Ngali, a playwright who was Minister of Culture between 1997 and 2002 before joining the opposition, said: “I do not expect anything from the March 21 elections”.
“I think he (Sassou Nguesso) is tired – he should retire,” she told AFP.
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