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TANZANIA: KIKWETE OFFICIALLY NAMED TANZANIA'S ELECTED PRESIDENT December 20, 2005
Apunyu Bonny
(SomaliNet) Tanzania's foreign minister Jakaya Kikwete was on Tuesday declared by Tanzania's electoral commission winner of the country's presidential race, maintaining the ruling party's four-decade grip on power for another five years.
"I declare that Jakaya Kikwete has won this election and Ali Muhammed Shein is the elected vice president," said retired Judge Lewis Makame, chairman of the National Electoral Commission,
Kikwete, 55, has promised to continue the free-market policies of outgoing President Benjamin Mkapa who is stepping down after two terms in which he has consolidated the east African nation's reputation for relative stability.
The announcement at a brief ceremony broadcast on state television was made despite a legal challenge filed on Monday by an opposition candidate, Augustine Mrema of the Tanzania Labour Party. The court has given no indication on when it may rule.
Mrema, who got less than 1 percent of the 11.3 million votes cast, said he had evidence of vote-rigging and sued to stop the commission from endorsing Kikwete.
The electoral board rejected his and other opposition charges of vote fraud as baseless. The ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi's (CCM or Party of the Revolution) political dominance, critics say, means the re-introduction of multi-party politics in the early 1990s has had almost no effect in a nation that is one of the highest per-capita aid recipients in Africa.
Kikwete's nearest challenger, Ibrahim Lipumba of the Civic United Front (CUF), received 11.6 percent of the votes cast on the mainland and the semi-autonomous Zanzibar islands.
CCM also took 206 of the 232 elected parliamentary seats, meaning near-total control of legislation in the coffee-growing country of 35 million.
The CUF says the ruling party robbed it of victory in an Oct. 30 election for the local presidency of Zanzibar, its stronghold. It has also rejected the election results.
Violence erupted in Zanzibar during that election and during last week's poll, denting
Tanzania's reputation for relative calm in a region where politics often turn bloody.
Kikwete is due to be sworn in on Wednesday. He took 80.2 percent of the total in the Dec. 14 poll.