Angola: 1980 Single-Party Election

Extracted from: "Angola" IN Compendium of Elections in Southern Africa (2002), edited by Tom Lodge, Denis Kadima and David Pottie, EISA, 14-15.

Unlike most newly independent African countries, Angola (Mozambique too) started independence without elections being held. When elections eventually did take place they were single-party arrangements. Besides fighting a war, the MPLA government attempted to mobilise the population for a programme of socialist transformation. The name Workers' Party (Partido do Trabalho) was added to the name MPLA (MPLA-PT) when it was proclaimed a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. However, ideological orientation did not deter the regime to offer generous incentives to attract Western investors, especially to exploit and further explore the country's oil resource.

Since independence the MPLA has been riven by serious differences of opinion, including opposition by intellectuals to the leadership's authoritarianism and resentment on the part of black members at the domination of party and government by the mixed-race mestizos. The Marxist-Leninist recipe for countering factionalism lay in the creation of a vanguard party, which limited its membership to staunch supporters of the party's policies and ideology. As a result, the MPLA-PT became a rather exclusive elitist party whose members (less than 17 000 by 1980) were mostly government officials and military officers, while industrial workers and peasants constituted only a small minority.

By the time of his death in a Moscow hospital in September 1979, President Neto had purged his party of dissenters and it was left to his successor, José Eduardo dos Santos, to continue the transformation of the MPLA-PT into a vanguard party and to consolidate single-party governance. Born in Luanda in 1942 dos Santos was a founding member of the MPLA. After qualifying as a petroleum engineer in the Soviet Union he joined FAPLA in 1968, specialising in military telecommunications. He was elected to the MPLA's central committee and its political bureau in 1974. In the following year he became independent Angola's first foreign affairs minister and, by the time of his election as president by the MPLA-PT congress, he had been serving as minister of planning.

One of the new president's first moves was to have the independence constitution amended (in September 1980) to provide for an elected National People's Assembly to replace the existing nominated legislature. The more than 200 members of the People's Assembly, with a three-year term of office, were subsequently indirectly elected. The assembly was inaugurated on 11 November 1980. All citizens aged 18 and over were entitled to vote. Although candidates were not legally required to be MPLA-PT members, they were nevertheless carefully vetted through a system of committees to ensure that only MPLA-PT members were elected to an electoral college by the voters. The members of the electoral college elected the assembly members. The elaborate process also resulted in the People's Assembly membership being more or less equally divided between, on the one hand, bureaucrats and military officers and, on the other, urban workers and peasants.

With the government in control of the provincial capitals and other urban centres, provincial assemblies were elected at the same time as the National People's Assembly. The national electoral system also applied to the provinces. Provision was made for a hierarchy of directly and indirectly elected local councils, but most of them were not established or could not function because of the worsening security situation in the rural areas. In practice, the most influential administrations outside Luanda and the larger towns were the regional military councils. Their commanding officers initially reported directly to the president and, from 1984, to the central Defence and Security Council. Until the constitutional reforms of the early 1990s a People's Revolutionary Tribunal served as the principal court of law.

As was typical of Marxist-Leninist systems the elected bodies were subordinate to the party structures and, owing to the war conditions, also to the army commands in the provinces. The president's position was very powerful because he headed both the Political Bureau (the party's key decision-making body) and the Council of Ministers (cabinet). The idea was to have a decentralized system of governance, tightly controlled from above. In practice, the plethora of institutions led to inadequate control and gross inefficiency. Moreover, some members of the new bureaucratic ruling class found ample opportunities for self-enrichment schemes and other corrupt practices that have persisted until the present day - notwithstanding democratization in recent years.

Closely associated with the MPLA-PT were so called mass organizations, such as the National Union of Angolan Workers (UNTA), the Angolan Women's Organisation (OMA), the Popular Youth Movement for the Liberation of Angola (IMPLA) and others. Similar to the rest of society, they were expected to toe the party line. Wages and working conditions, for example, were dictated by the party and workers' strikes were illegal.