Chad's President Deby faces 12 challengers in hotly contested polls

Chadians went to the polls on Sunday to elect a president who will serve them for the next five years, in a hotly contested election that has 13 candidates including incumbent President Idriss Deby Itno.

Deby is seeking his fifth consecutive five-year term since the re-introduction of multiparty politics in 1996, five years after coming to power through a military coup.

Some of the 6 million registered voters started heading to polling stations early in the morning before the official start of the voting process, which was to last for eleven and half hours between 6 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. local time.

President Deby Itno, accompanied with his wife Hinda, voted at around 8 a.m. at a polling station in Amriguebe suburb within the capital N'Djamena's fifth district, which is considered to be Deby's stronghold.

Generally, no major incident has so far been reported, but the display of electoral lists at the polling stations has so far not happened, with the exception of a few polling stations in the capital.

This has disenfranchised voters who have to move to different polling stations searching for their names so that they can vote.

Published following a presidential decree issued on March 5 after being prepared by the National Independent Election Commission, the biometric voters' lists are as a result of a decision taken by the authorities after many years of fighting with the opposition which, today, is skeptical about the system's reliability.

In the capital, few vehicles were visible and most shops remained closed on Sunday morning. However, traders in the main markets could not resist the temptation to open their businesses, especially due to the current poor economic situation that has been exacerbated by the drop in oil prices and other raw materials the country exports.

A well placed source told Xinhua the results of the elections will be known within two weeks. If none of the candidates gets 50 percent of the votes cast, then a second round will be held in early May.

After two weeks of election campaigns that ended on Friday night, uncertainty remains over the outcome of the elections that were held in a tensed environment, marked by anger expressed through two simultaneous strikes in key sectors of education and health, as well as arrest of several civil society actors who were accused of engaging in disorderly conduct.

The tension was heightened on Friday after an armed group declared its existence in Chad's Far North region, an area that has witnessed unprecedented movement of weapons allegedly obtained from the stock piles of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The expressions of anger were the main arguments by the opponents of the incumbent president who have insisted that it was impossible for him to win.

However, after casting his vote on Sunday, Deby seemed unperturbed and expressed confidence that he will win Sunday's elections.

It should be noted that this year's election was the first time in 26 years that Deby visited all the four corners of the national territory to convince voters to support his re-election bid.

In 2006 and 2011, opposition boycott enabled him to be re-elected without any difficulty in the first round with 77.53 percent and 88.26 percent respectively.

These were higher scores when compared to the 2001 elections when Deby scored 63.17 percent of the votes cast. Five years earlier, he was forced to contest in the second round which he eventually won with 69.09 percent.

"It is true Deby has done some good things, but time for change has come. The country is stuck because of him. He was booed in Doba during a campaign rally. This was a sign of the people's anger," one of the president's main challenger Joseph Djimrangar Dadnadji told Xinhua on phone on Saturday.

Dadnadji, who is a former Chadian prime minister, is part of an opposition coalition formed on April 5 in N'Djamena, whose main objective is to "protect the votes and unite opposition leaders after the elections."

The electoral process kicked off on Saturday with soldiers, nomads and Chadians in diaspora casting their votes.

However, the opposition has already raised allegations of rigging, especially through ballot stuffing and creation of fictitious polling stations, besides intimidation of voters.

Source:Xinhua