Burkina Faso President, Roch Marc Christian Kabore will serve another five years as leader of the West African country after winning general elections held on 22nd November.
Newton Ahmed Barry, head of the National Independent Electoral Commission (NIEC) announced that e “Mr Kabore … with 57.87 percent of the vote, is provisionally elected president of [Burkina] Faso in the first round.”
A few minutes after the announcement, President Kabore vowed to strengthen dialogue in his “troubled country” after the landslide victory in his bid for a second term.
“I will deploy all my efforts so that through continuous consultation, through dialogue … we can work together for peace and development,” he said at his party’s headquarters in the capital Ouagadougou.
Some analysts had expected a closer contest in the election between Kabore, who was elected in 2015, and his 12 rivals, who argued he had failed to contain armed groups and ethnic violence.
President Kabore received 1.6 million votes of the nearly three million cast, with voter turnout at 50 percent.
The voting process was marred by threats of attacks by armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) which operate across vast swathes of Burkina Faso amid an escalating security situation in West Africa’s Sahel.
The conflict killed some 2,000 people in Burkina Faso in 2019 and more than one million Burkinabe people have been displaced by the fighting.
The opposition had hoped to split the vote and deprive the incumbent of the 51 percent needed for an outright victory and then form a coalition behind the strongest candidate for round two.
But leading candidate, Eddie Komboigo, head of the Congress for Democracy and Progress, received 15 percent and the other leading rival, Zephirin Diabre, from the Progress and Change Party, who also lost to President Kabore during the previous election, received approximately 12 percent.
The opposition have accused the governing party of foul play, including bribery.
The process was “riddled with fraud” and the electoral commission was not up to the task of organising responsible elections, Tahirou Barry, an opposition candidate, told a news conference.
The electoral body, though, has dismissed such claims and an international observer mission said the election devoid of any major issues.
The opposition has seven days to appeal the vote. It was not immediately clear if they would.
The African Union and the Economic Community of West African States said appeals should be made through legal avenues in a “calm environment and especially to avoid violence,” Makuza Bernard, who led the AU delegation, told reporters.
Civil society organisations say the president will need to work harder in his second term to unite an increasingly divided country.
“He should make sure that promises not met during the last five years will be met in order to alleviate social discontent. The social discontent is not only happening in big towns but that is happening more and more in the countryside,” Chrysogone Zougmore, president of the Burkinabe Movement for Human Rights, a local advocacy group said.
