DR Congo senate election postponed

[Ron Burgundy]

AFP - The electoral commission in the Democratic Republic of Congo has postponed indirect elections to the Senate for lack of candidates in some constituencies.

The deadline for standing as a senatorial candidate has been postponed from November 13 until November 30 and the actual Senate vote, among elected members of provincial assembles, will now take place on January 7, they said.

"We'll publish a timetable," the rapporteur of the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI), Dieudonne Mirimo, told AFP. "We realised that we don't have candidates in all the constituencies."

Mirimo said several political parties wanted the delay and commented that "they were more interested in the presidential poll and were distracted" by the run-off round of that vote on October 29, when former rebel and Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba has challenged the incumbent Joseph Kabila.

The electoral commission has yet to release full results of the presidential poll, scheduled for Sunday, but the partial results issued thus far place President Kabila well ahead.

Also at the end of October, people across the vast central African country cast their ballots in elections to provincial parliaments, whose members will be called on January 7 to elect senators, under the newly announced arrangement that put off the poll from December 29.

In the long-term, senators with a five-year mandate will be elected on the basis of four representatives for each of 25 new provinces and eight for the capital Kinshasa, but initially they will represent the current 11 provinces.

The country, which has since 2003 begun to emerge from a devastating war that drew in half a dozen foreign armies, has a new constitution setting up the 26 new provinces, but also provides for a 36-month period to redraw the boundaries.

Mirimo said that elections for provincial governors, which will also be conducted by indirect suffrage among the provincial members of parliament, will go ahead as planned on January 16.

Finally, there will be local government elections as part of a long process in which key stages were elections to the national parliament in July and the first and second round of the presidential polls.

The former Zaire, long ruled under that name by the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who was ousted in 1997, has not previously known free elections for 41 years since its independence from Belgium.