Mali: No Clear Leader as Election Results Trickle In

29 April 2002
allAfrica.com
By Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

Bamako, Mali — The initial counting of votes from the first round of Mali's presidential election started at dusk on Sunday, bathed in flickering candlelight, assisted by the glow of paraffin lamps and a flashlight, in one school classroom-turned-polling station in the Malian capital, Bamako.

The focus moved overnight to the National Counting Commission headquarters (at the Ministry of Territorial Administration) in Bamako, where laborious vote-counting and collating continued through the night until 07h30 on Monday morning, followed by a long break late into the morning.

Malians waited patiently all day to hear the first results.

A 10h00 update news conference, arranged by the election organizers, did not happen. Similarly, a call for journalists to assemble at 16h00 yielded little supplementary information.

Proceedings at the Counting Commission broke up at 03h00 after an official announced to journalists that no further information could be released, because a key computer operative working on the processing of results had been injured in a serious road accident. Work is scheduled to resume at 08h00 on Wednesday morning.

The front page of the pro-government Essor newspaper on Monday reported that the overall winner in Mali was "serenity", a reference to the mainly peaceful presidential ballot on Sunday, despite minor shortcomings, including disorganization, delays and isolated attempts at fraud.

Early Monday, preliminary results were still trickling in from all over the huge country, and abroad - from as far as Beijing, Moscow, Havana and Riyadh - all home to immigrant Malian communities.

Closer to home, there were early election returns from Niamey, Niger and, up north in Tunis and down south in Johannesburg, Results were still awaited from across the border in Ivory Coast, where the largest group of Malians outside the country lives.

But what most were waiting for was news of which of the two dozen presidential candidates might have taken the lead by late Monday. There were few solid indications from the election results’ nerve centre in Bamako and the expectation was that voter turnout in the city would prove to be low.

Final results were expected on Tuesday.

Preliminary and incomplete returns on Monday put the three front runners in the lead. Amadou Toumani Toure, ("ATT") is a retired military general who led a popular transitional government to democratic elections in 1992, after overthrowing an unpopular autocratic leader. One-time charismatic prime minister Ibrahim Boubacar Keita ("IBK") is another leading candidate. He broke ranks with the governing Adema party and President Alpha Oumar Konare. Soumaila Cisse is the official Adema candidate and a former finance minister.

But they are just three of a large field of 24 contenders hoping to succeed Mali’s outgoing president, who steps down in June after completing his constitutional limit of two five-year terms.

Cisse’s camp told journalists that their computerized system showed that the three were running neck and neck at about 30 percent each by Monday evening.

Later on Monday, with just 10 percent of the vote count in, the race appeared to be narrowing between two of the leading candidates, ATT and IBK. But this trend could easily change with the majority of results not yet in.

Mali is a vast, poor nation whose lands are mainly desert. More than 5.7 million people in and outside the country were eligible to vote in the presidential election on Sunday. Results from remote areas and desert areas are slow to come in, because of a lack of telephones and fax machines to promptly send in results to the central counting office in the capital.

Many Malians reckon, and analysts predict, that there will be no outright winner gaining the necessary 50 percent of the vote in the first round. If they are right, the two leading candidates will have to participate in a run-off poll between the two best performers on May 12. Government officials indicated to journalists that they would have more solid results to publish by 22h00 local time (and GMT).

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