27 August, 2017
But the leading opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, said that their independent vote count told a different story.
The MPLA won the election with 61 percent of the vote, the country's election commission said after 98 percent of votes from Wednesday's election were counted.
Angola's ruling party has won the national election but lost ground to the opposition, the electoral commission said Friday, as the oil-rich but impoverished African nation faces its first change of leadership after almost four decades.
Angola, which has sub-Saharan Africa's third-largest economy, has been mostly peaceful since.
Defense Minister Joao Lourenco will replace President Jose Eduardo dos Santos after 38 years in power.
Worldwide observers described the election as reasonably free and fair and the streets of the capital Luanda and other cities were calm.
"We do not accept these results, not because they show the MPLA in front, but because we don't think they are true", said deputy party leader Rafael Massanga Savimbi.
Further provisional results are expected later on Friday. "But we know we have time to verify this".
Hours before the electoral commission announced the party's 64 percent lead in Wednesday's poll, the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola declared that it was assured of victory in a poll that it called "free, secret and joyful".
The MPLA, which emerged victorious over UNITA after 27 years of civil war in 2002, dismissed the complaints. Final results are expected to be announced on September 6, according to the electoral commission. UNITA's share of seats rises from 32 to 51.
FILE PHOTO: A boy skates along a section of the waterfront in Luanda, Angola, in this picture taken May 12, 2015.
"The country doesn't yet have valid electoral results", Isaias Samakuva, the leader of Unita, said at a press conference in Viana, on the outskirts of the capital Luanda.
"The process violated the law and the principles of democracy", he told Reuters.
UNITA has not said whether it will contest the final results in court. But the OPEC member, Africa's second largest oil producer, is in dire need of reforms to boost an economy hammered in the last three years by suppressed crude prices.
Lourenco has vowed to revive the economy and has not ruled out deals with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to help restructure an economy that is overly dependent on oil.
A quiet 63-year-old more used to army barracks and the closed doors of party politics than the public spotlight, Lourenco has denied he will remain in dos Santos' shadow. The victory for the ruling MPLA party represents continuity, though some observers hope Lourenco, a dos Santos loyalist who has pledged to fight widespread corruption, will work on transparency despite an entrenched elite that includes the dos Santos family.
