DR Congo election panel postpones vote by a week to Dec 30
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Long-delayed elections due to be held in DR
Congo on Sunday will be postponed by a week after voting machines were
destroyed in a warehouse fire, the country's electoral board said Thursday.
"The presidential, legislative
and provincial elections will therefore take place on December 30, 2018,"
the head of the Independent National Election Commission (CENI), Corneille
Nangaa, told the press.
"The electoral process
continues," he said.
The sprawling central African country
is in the grip of a two-year-old crisis over elections for a successor to
President Joseph Kabila, in power since 2001.
The announcement on Thursday concerns
the loss of South Korean-made touchscreen voting machines introduced for the
poll.
Under the system, a voter touches a
photo of the candidate to cast their ballot and then receives a printout of it.
The paper is then put in a ballot box to provide verification by a manual count
later.
The government said the machines were
vital for staging elections swiftly, fairly and accurately across a vast
country with poor infrastructure.
But the devices sparked a political
storm from the outset, with some opposition leaders -- although not all --
saying they were vulnerable to hacking and fraud.
On December 13, a fire broke out in a
Kinshasa warehouse, destroying around 8,000 of some 10,000 machines earmarked
for the capital, Kinshasa, according to CENI.
More than a tenth of the country's 44
million registered voters live in the city.
Nangaa said his organisation had
brought to Kinshasa surplus machines that it had in the provinces.
"However, the problem is that our
reserve stocks do not include ballot papers. We therefore have had to order
them from the South Korean supplier," he said.
"Five million ballot papers have
been ordered," he said.
"The first batch arrived in
Kinshasa on Wednesday (but) the final batch can only be delivered on Saturday
evening," the eve of the elections, he said.
Kabila, 47, was due to step down at
the end of 2016 after completing his constitution-limited two terms in office.
But he stayed on, invoking a caretaker
clause in the constitution that enables a president to stay in office until his
or her successor is elected.
The elections were postponed until the
end of 2017 under a deal brokered by the powerful Catholic church, and then
again until 2018.
The delay sparked protests that were
violently suppressed, with dozens of deaths, leading to an outcry by western
nations and the UN.
Opposition candidates last week
suggested the government could have been behind the fire, to use as a pretext
to again delay the vote.
