South Sudan: Anxiety Builds as Vote Count Commences

By Eric Sande

JUBA--Anxiety runs in the nerves of majority of the South Sudanese as the count for secession or unity is currently underway with partial results leaking a land slide for secession. A marathon task of counting the ballot was kicked off on Sunday after the week-long polling on partitioning Africa's largest nation closed.

The official counts of the referendum are trickling in, with the country's diaspora in Europe overwhelmingly voting for secession. The London results declared that more than 97 per cent of the 640 voters had been in favour of a new state.

In the regional capital Juba, the first voting centres to post their results all returned huge majorities for breaking away from the north and turning the page on the five decades of conflict that have blighted Africa's largest nation.

Counting was being conducted by torchlight in parts of Juba that had no source of electricity, creating an almost religious atmosphere in the small classrooms.

Each vote was passed for checking to two other polling station staff and shown to domestic and international observers. There were a dozen at the school in Juba's Hay Malakal neighbourhood.

Juba University recorded 2 663 votes to 69 and in the city's Hay Malakal neighbourhood it was 1 809 to 75.

Rural areas, where many were out in the open, locked away the ballot boxes for the night and were due to start counting later on Sunday.

The referendum commission's chairman, Mohammed Ibrahim Khalil, an elder statesman who served as Sudanese foreign minister in the 1960s, hailed the "most peaceful" election he had ever seen in Sudan.

"While the Sudanese would want to know the outcome of the referendum quickly, we urge the people of Sudan to be patient and be aware that only the results announced by the referendum authorities are official", cautioned a Unitd Nations panel set up to monitor the referendum.

The vote was the centrepiece of a 2005 peace deal that ended a devastating 22-year civil war between north and south that cost around two million lives.