DR Congo awaits result after volatile presidential election

But there was also much evidence of organisational problems, including with the contested voting machines.

A monitoring commission with 40,000 grass-roots observers, set up by the Catholic Church, said it had received 1,543 reports of incidents by early afternoon.

Of these, 544 involved “malfunctions with voting machines,” it said.

In some places, long queues built up because of a lack of electoral roll or because voters could not find their names on the lists, AFP reporters found.

At Imara in Lubumbashi, 30-year-old voter Diane Mumba, said: “The (voting) machines have been breaking down again and again for the last two hours. I don’t know when I am going to vote.”

The vote for a new president took place alongside legislative and municipal polls.

– Frail giant –

Almost the size of continental western Europe, the DRC is rich in gold, uranium, copper, cobalt and other minerals, but little wealth trickles down to the poor.

In the last 22 years, it has twice been a battleground for wars drawing in armies from central and southern Africa.

That legacy endures in the jungles of eastern DRC, where militias have carried out hundreds of killings.

Insecurity and an ongoing Ebola epidemic in part of North Kivu province, and communal violence in Yumbi, in the southwest, prompted the authorities to postpone the elections there until March.

Around 1.25 million people in a national electoral roll of around 40 million voters are affected.

Despite this, the elections in the rest of the country have gone ahead.