Angola's ruling party wins general election (African rulers and unending tenures)

Angola President Jose Eduardo dos Santos' nearly 33 years in power looks set to be extended after his ruling People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) party took 74.46 per cent of votes in national elections, according to provisional results. Julia Ferreira, an electoral commission spokeswoman, said on Saturday that with about 58 per cent of ballots counted, the MPLA had taken nearly three quarters of the ballots. The provisional results gave the MPLA's closest challenger, former rebel group UNITA, 17.94 percent, while the third-placed CASA-CE party had 4.53 percent. The turnout was just over 57 per cent. Further results would be announced later, Ferreira said, but those in so far showed the MPLA on track for a sweeping victory in the vote, which had passed peacefully. The provisional turnout was just over 57 percent, the commission said. Dos Santos had been widely expected to win the election, which was constantly postponed until last year, when the government changed the constitution so that the leader of the party with the most votes becomes president. Voters on Friday were electing politicians for the 220-seat parliament. Pedro Verona Pires, chief of the African Union's observer team, described the organisation of the election as "satisfactory" compared to the country's previous election in 2008. "Everyone agrees that the elections this year were better organised than in 2008," Pires, who is also the former president of Cape Verde, told the AFP news agency. Former battlefield This is the country's third national election since Angola won independence from Portugal in 1975, and the second since the end a decade ago of a 27-year civil war. This southern African nation was a Cold War battlefield until 2002, with dos Santos' MPLA backed by Cuban soldiers and a Soviet war chest, pitted against UNITA, which was backed by apartheid South Africa and the US. Half a million people died in the war, while more than four million, a third of the population, were displaced and much infrastructure was destroyed. Since the war ended in 2002, Angola has dominated the list of the world's fastest growing economies and is sub-Saharan Africa's second-largest oil producer, after Nigeria, fueling a building boom of houses, hospitals, schools, roads and bridges. But 87 per cent of urban Angolans live in shanty towns, often with no access to clean water, according to UNICEF, and more than a third of Angolans live below the poverty line.