By RODOLFO KIKOLO
Associated Press Writer
LUANDA, Angola - Angola's president would no longer be directly elected by the people under a new constitution approved by parliament.
Critics say giving parliament the power to name the president will only further entrench President Eduardo Dos Santos, who has been in power since 1979. Dos Santos has said adopting the method South Africa and others in the region use to pick a president is more efficient and less costly.
The main opposition party, UNITA, boycotted Thursday's vote on the constitution, which was approved 186-0, with two abstentions. The charter must now be approved by the Constitutional Court, a step seen as a formality.
Even as multiparty elections become the norm across Africa after decades of dictatorship and one-party rule, the entrenchment of powerful parties is seen as undermining democracy. In many cases, the parties in power are embraced by voters for having led campaigns against colonial rule or, in the case of South Africa, apartheid.
It becomes almost impossible for opposition politicians to make inroads when an iconic party also has control of the state broadcaster — often the medium with the widest reach in Africa; earns the loyalty of a civil service that comes to see itself as part of the party; and fails to control corruption.
Dos Santos is under pressure from rights groups at home and abroad to strengthen democracy, but at times he seems to see the effort as a distraction from rebuilding a country devastated by war.
Dos Santos's MPLA has been in power since Agostinho Neto became the first president of independent Angola in 1975. Upon Neto's death in 1979, then-Planning Minister dos Santos became president.
At a party meeting late last year, dos Santos said presidential elections would be delayed from 2009 to at least 2012, and indicated then he preferred having voters elect parliament, and then parliament elect that president. That ensures the party that controls parliament controls the presidency.
The next parliamentary elections are in 2012. The 2008 parliamentary vote, the first in 16 years, was won overwhelmingly by dos Santos's Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola party, known as the MPLA for the initials of its name in Portuguese.
Dos Santos last contested an election in 1992, during a break in a civil war that had started in 1975 after the country gained independence from Portugal. Fighting broke out anew after UNITA — the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola — refused to accept results showing it had lost the 1992 polls.
The war ended in 2002, when the army killed the UNITA rebel leader Jonas Savimbi.
Angola is rich in diamonds and oil, but its people are impoverished and its infrastructure in ruins.
With oil prices falling, the IMF gave Angola a $1.4 billion loan in November. To get the loan, Angola had to agree to regular, public reviews of its finances. Angola ranks among the world's most corrupt countries, according to the watchdog Transparency International, which surveys businesses and experts to measure perceived levels of public sector corruption around the globe.
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