{"id":31657,"date":"2026-04-13T09:49:37","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T07:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/?post_type=news&#038;p=31657"},"modified":"2026-04-13T09:49:37","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T07:49:37","slug":"benin-tallies-ballots-after-weekend-presidential-election","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/news\/benin-tallies-ballots-after-weekend-presidential-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Benin tallies ballots after weekend Presidential Election"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Benin election officials began counting votes after Sunday&#8217;s election for a President, with Finance Minister Romuald Wadagni favourite, having overseen a decade of economic growth despite jihadist attacks in the north.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The Head of the Electoral Commission, Sacca Lafia, said the election had taken place peacefully.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>But an electoral monitoring platform set up by civil society groups reported around a hundred incident &#8220;alerts&#8221; at the polls.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The cases are said to have involved voting stations that had opened early or where voting boxes appeared full before the start of voting.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Nearly eight million voters were eligible to cast ballots to choose a successor to Patrice Talon, who steps down after two five-year terms, having endorsed Wadagni as his successor.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>&#8211;Channel Africa&#8211;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":13882,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-31657","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"","published_date":"","news_description":"Benin election officials began counting votes","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/31657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/31657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31658,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/31657\/revisions\/31658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=31657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}