Former PM favored to win Mali’s presidency
Print Edition
Former Prime Minister Ibrahima Boubacar Keita was the favorite to win a presidential election yesterday that Malians hope will restore stability in a country torn apart by last year’s coup and Islamist insurgency.
The winner of the run-off ballot will oversee more than US$4 billion in foreign aid promised to rebuild the West African nation, after France sent thousands of troops in January to break the grip of al-Qaida-linked rebels over its desert north.
He must also tackle deep-rooted corruption and forge a lasting peace with northern Tuaregs after decades of sporadic uprisings, issues that combined to trigger the ousting of former President Amadou Toumani Toure in a March 2012 coup and allowed Islamists to seize the northern two-thirds of Mali.
Braving heavyrain, dozens of voters lined up in front of the Mamadou Guindo school in the riverside capital Bamako’s Badalabougou district to wait for the polling station to open.
“It’s my duty to vote,” said 25-year-old student Moussa Sidibe, the first to cast a ballot when voting began at 8am. “I am hoping that the new president will make the problems of education, youth employment and healthcare a priority.”
Voting took place at some 21,000 polling stations across the landlocked nation from the forested south, home to some 90 percent of Mali’s 16 million people, to the northern cities of Timbuktu and Gao, where Islamists imposed sharia law.
Keita is the frontrunner after winning nearly 40 percent of the July 28 first-round vote with pledges to impose order and restore the honor of the once-proud nation, which had been regarded as a bulwark of stability in a turbulent region.
Twenty-two of the 25 losing first-round candidates have since thrown their weight behind Keita, 68, a man who earned a reputation for firmness in crushing student protests and strikes when he was prime minister in the 1990s.
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