The Central African Republic has amended its constitutional provisions to allow the incumbent president to seek a third term in office.
This comes as the country’s National Election Authority announced the results of the July 30 referendum on Monday, with voters casting 95.27 percent of ballots in favor of the tenure elongation.
The electoral body estimated the turnout of the referendum to be over 61 percent, despite the exercise being boycotted by the country’s main opposition parties and civil society organizations, as well as armed rebel groups.
According to RFI, the provisional results must now be ratified by the constitutional court, which is slated to publish the definitive outcome on August 27.
The new constitution was designed to extend the presidential mandate from five to seven years and abolish the two-term limit.
The incumbent, 66-year-old Head of State Faustin-Archange Touadera, can now seek a third term in 2025, and his opponents have said he wants to remain “president for life”.
Touadera was first elected in 2016 when the country emerged from a civil war that spiraled along sectarian lines following a coup. In his efforts to tighten up security, he brought in the private Russian mercenary group Wagner, which was first deployed to the CAR in 2018.
In 2020, Touadera won a second five-year term after a vote interrupted by incursions by armed rebel groups and allegations of fraud.
Since December 2020, hundreds of Wagner fighters and Rwandan troops have been deployed to face an offensive led by an alliance of the country’s most powerful rebel groups.
The opposition also complained about the lack of an up-to-date electoral register and said institutions tasked with guaranteeing a free and fair vote were not independent.
“It’s a comedy… We’ve all seen that people didn’t go out to vote, and it doesn’t reflect the will of the Central African people,” Crepin Mboli-Goumba, coordinator of the BRDC opposition coalition, told AFP.
The NGO Human Rights Watch reports that government officials have “cajoled and threatened referendum opponents”, and that authorities banned an opposition rally in the capital in a bid to keep a lid on hostility toward the poll.
Touadera supporters are also accused of targeting the president of the Constitutional Court, Daniele Darlan, who was later forced to retire.
A landlocked nation in central Africa, the CAR is considered one of the poorest and most troubled countries in the world.
It has been going through conflict and political turmoil for most of its history since its independence from France in 1960.
