Bamako, Mali — Partial and provisional results from Mali's presidential election, after a quarter of the constituencies have been counted, put a retired military general in the lead, as a slow and contested count continued in the capital, Bamako.
More than 48 hrs after polls closed on Sunday night, the chairman of the vote-counting commission at the Territorial Administration ministry said retired parachute commander, General Amadou Toumani Toure had a three-point lead over his two immediate rivals, Soumaila Cisse and Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
After 536,435 votes had been counted, Toure had gained 142,978 votes, giving him 26.65 per cent, ahead of Cisse with 124,021 votes (23.12 per cent) and Keita with 116,126 votes (21.65 per cent).
Toure was also leading the other contenders in provisional votes cast by Malians outside the country. Of 11,533 such votes in so far, from capitals such as Beijing, Havana, Johannesburg and Moscow, Toure polled 3,654 (31.53 per cent) nosing ahead of Cisse with 3,230 (27.87 per cent) and Keita lying third with 2,788 (24.06 per cent).
The announcement came after 26.42 per cent of the electoral constituencies - 177 of 702 communes and 18 of 35 foreign jurisdictions - had been counted. There are 5.7m registered voters in Mali. There have been no results from Bamako so far.
Toure, known by his initials "ATT", campaigned as an independent with the support of 27 of Mali's 80 political parties. He became a national hero when he overthrew the unpopular, autocratic one-party regime of Moussa Traore in 1991. He went on to head a transitional government that handed back power to an elected civilian administration the following year.
Soumaila Cisse is a candidate of the governing Adema party. Keita, a former prime minister, known as "IBK" broke away from Adema to form his own party, the Rally for Mali (RPM).
All three were far ahead of the other 21 candidates bidding to become Mali's new president. To win outright, a candidate has to secure more than 50 per cent of the vote. If no candidate tops 50% there will be a second round run-off between the two leading contenders.
Tense evening
The announcement of interim results came after a tense evening during which parties complained at the slow pace of the count and a group led by Ibrahim Boubacar Keita's party, the Rally for Mali (RPM), denounced the way results were being processed and validated.
The RPM Secretary-General, Seydou Nourou Keita, flanked by commission members from at least five minor parties, told journalists they could not accept discrepancies they had seen between results arriving from polling stations via the Internet and others from the same polling stations arriving by phone, fax and radio.
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Keita told a hastily convened news briefing that results should be correctly established by the Commission before they were made public.
He said the six parties were dissociating themselves from any published election result, which they considered the product of a faulty process. But he stressed that this did not mean that the RPM, or the other supporting parties, were withdrawing from the Commission, which validates the presidential election results.
Keita denied that his comments were a preemptive move by his party to prepare for the defeat of its candidate, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, and insisted that it was simply a matter of ensuring that the poll was credible and transparent.
The National Independent Electoral Commission which was present at the news briefing and is represented on the counting commission, stated that it had not noted any irregularity in processing votes.
Allaye Diall, representing the ministry of territorial administration, which chairs the work of the counting commission, apologised to journalists for long delays but said they wanted "election results that were credible and serious".
Meanwhile, the French News Agency, AFP, reported Tuesday that Mali's Constitutional Court had received three complaints about the conduct of the election campaign. Two were fairly minor, but a third, more serious complaint concerned the call by 20 Islamic associations last week for Muslims to vote for Ibrahima Boubacar Keita or "IBK". Mali, which is predominantly Muslim, is a secular state.
