Burkina Faso re-elect President Kabore

Fri, Nov 27, 2020
By editor
2 MIN READ

Africa

By Paul Ejime

WITH almost 100% of votes tallied in Burkina Faso’s Sunday presidential and National Assembly polls, President Rock Marc Christian Kabore has secured 57.87% of the vote for a second five-year mandate.

According to the Electoral Commission, CENI, candidate Eddie Komboigo of the former ruling CDP has 15.48% as runner-up and Zephirin Diabre is third with 12.46%.

A candidate requires 51% of the vote to win.

Thirteen candidates including Kadre Desire Ouedraogo, a former ECOWAS Commission president are in the presidential contest.

Kabore, 63, a former banker and one-time prime minister set up the Peoples Movement for Progress to win his first term presidency in 2015 after Blaise Compaore, former president and military ruler was toppled by a ‘people power’ revolt in 2014 after 27 years’ rule.

Kabore was a member of the former ruling CDP and one-time president of the National Assembly.

Sunday’s polls for the presidency and the 127-seat National Assembly were overshadowed by a lingering jihadist insurgency, which has claimed some 2,000 lives in Burkina Faso, the country of late revolutionary leader Capt. Thomas Sankara.

Sankara took power in a coup in 1983 but was himself toppled and killed in another putsch by his friend Compaore in 1987, cutting short Sankara’s widely acclaimed political reforms, including the change of the country’s name from Upper Volta to Burkina Faso

Some 6.5 million registered voters took part in the elections, but the electoral commission said some 350,000 of the voters were unable to cast their ballots due to terror-related insecurity in parts of the country.

The Sahelian land-locked cotton-rich country has an estimated population of some 21million people.

According to international observers, the Burkina Faso electoral process has been generally more peaceful and transparent compared to recent votes in Guinea and Cote d’Ivoire marred by violence over third-term presidency dispute.

There are still two presidential votes this year in the ECOWAS region – Ghana on 7 December and Niger on 27 December.

27, N0V 2020 @08:16 GMT

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