The document was approved with 27 votes in favor, one abstention and zero against, at the joint meeting of the Constitutional and Legal Affairs and State Administration and Local Government committees of the National Assembly, which was marked by the abandonment of voting act by the parliamentary group of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), for not agreeing with the distribution.
The meeting's sole purpose was to assess the Joint Opinion Report and the Draft Resolution, which, in accordance with the Law on the Organization and Functioning of the CNE and the Organic Law on General Elections, establishes the new composition of the CNE, as a result of the results of the general elections of August 24, 2022.
With the approval of the project, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the majority party, has nine representatives, UNITA, with four, the Social Renewal Party (PRS), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) and the Angolan Humanist Party (PHA), with one representative each.
The UNITA parliamentary group, in a press release, pointed out several reasons for abandoning the voting act, including that the preparatory process for the meeting violated the Rules of Procedure of the National Assembly, as, in addition to the president of the Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, no other member of the first and fourth commissions participated in the preliminary discussion, demonstrating "unilateralist practices".
"Based on the results of 2022, UNITA had an increase of 39 deputies, which represents an increase of more seats in the CNE. However, striving for the principle of reasonableness, it initially proposed eight seats for the MPLA, instead of nine, five seats for UNITA, instead of seven, in honor of the principle of respect for minorities, leaving three mandates to be distributed, at the rate of one for each of the other political forces with parliamentary seats (PRS, FNLA and PHA)", says.
According to the UNITA parliamentary group, the party asked the table for clarifications to assess the criteria of the MPLA's proposal, in partnership with the PRS, FNLA and PHA, also suggesting "the suspension of voting to establish dialogue between all political forces, with a parliamentary seat and clear up mistakes".
"Faced with the lack of clarification and with the panel's irreducible intention of submitting the matter to a vote anyway, violating the law and the most basic basic precepts of healthy coexistence in democracy, which suggest dialogue in search of consensus, the deputies of the UNITA parliamentary group decided not to take part in a vote under these conditions", points out in the document.
