Ahead of announcement of results from the presidential election that could come later in the day, Democratic Republic of Congo’s electoral commission (CENI) met all night Tuesday and into Wednesday morning.
Riot police were deployed in front of the commission headquarters in the capital Kinshasa and along the city’s main boulevard, as Congo braced for possible violence amid accusations of vote fraud and suspicions that the government was negotiating a power-sharing deal with one opposition candidate.
The Dec. 30 poll was meant to lead to the vast Central African country’s first democratic transfer of power in its 59 years of independence, but a disputed result could trigger the kind of violence that erupted after the 2006 and 2011 elections and destabilize Congo’s volatile eastern borderlands.
President Joseph Kabila is due to leave office this month after 18 years in power and backed his former interior minister, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, in the election.