LUSAKA--Boats and ox-wagons were deployed to get ballot papers to parts of Zambia hit by torrential rains as presidential elections were extended for a second day Wednesday.
A planned airlift of ballot papers and polling officers to remote villages was disrupted on Tuesday by "extreme thunderstorms" which grounded flights, election authorities said.
Some 21,00 voters in dozens of polling stations are now expected to cast ballots on Wednesday in a hotly contested presidential election to replace Michael Sata, who died in office last year.
At stake is the remaining year and a half of his five-year term in the copper-rich but impoverished southern African nation.
Eleven candidates are vying for the presidency, but the frontrunners are tipped to be ruling Patriotic Front (PF) candidate Edgar Lungu and Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development (UPND).
The extension of voting led to a suspension of the release of early results from the election.
"Let's allow them to vote without undue influence," said Electoral commission chairwoman Irene Mambilima.
Final results are not expected until Friday.
The delay in the delivery of polling material initially led Hichilema, a wealthy businessman, to cry foul and allege fraud.
He has also complained about the extension of voting, the shifting of some polling stations and alleged acts of violence by ruling PF supporters
"Clear acts of violence... obviously frighten off voters," he told reporters after meeting electoral officials.
The head of a Southern African observer team, South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane commended the electoral body for holding a "generally peaceful" vote under "challenging" conditions.
A group of southern African NGOs said the "elections were credible based on the voting day and generally the election was free and fair."
- 'Two-horse race' -
In the absence of reliable opinion polls, analysts hedged their bets.
"It's a two-horse race," said Oliver Saasa, CEO of Premier Consult, a business and economic consultancy firm. "It's quite clear this is a very closely run race."
Hichilema's camp is seen to have received a boost from the infighting within another major opposition party, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD), whose candidate Nevers Mumba has little chance.
Lungu's PF, meanwhile, went into the vote badly fractured by a bitter power struggle after Sata's death in October.
With ideological differences between Zambia's political parties difficult to pin down, voting patterns are often determined by personalities and ethnicity rather than issues.
Despite growth-oriented policies and a stable economy over the past few years, at least 60 percent of Zambia's population of 15 million lives below the poverty line, according to World Bank figures.
About 5.2 million people were eligible to vote, but turnout is expected to be low, partly because of the weather.
AFP
