Dozens of people in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) city of Beni marched and burned tires on Thursday to protest against the electoral commission’s decision to exclude its voters from Sunday’s presidential election.

NAN reports that General elections are scheduled to be held in the DRC on Dec. 30, to determine a successor to incumbent President Joseph Kabila.

Congo’s electoral commission (CENI) announced on Wednesday that it was cancelling voting in Beni, its surrounding areas and the nearby city of Butembo due to an ongoing Ebola outbreak and militia violence.

Those places are strongholds of opposition to Kabila.

Local politicians denounced the move as an effort to swing the vote in favour of Kabila’s preferred candidate, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary.

“The police are up against demonstrators who have barricaded the road. The whole town is up in smoke,” Edmond Siku, a Beni resident, said by telephone.

Beni and the rural areas around it have been dealing with an Ebola outbreak – now the second-deadliest in history – since August, but health authorities had repeatedly said that it would not prevent the vote from going ahead.

The election to replace Kabila, who has governed since replacing his assassinated father in 2001, was meant to take place in 2016 but has been repeatedly delayed.

That has triggered violent protests in which security forces killed dozens of people.

It has also stoked militia violence in Congo’s eastern borderlands with Rwanda and Uganda as armed groups moved to exploit a perceived power vacuum.

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Shadary is facing two main challengers in a field of 21 candidates: Felix Tshisekedi, the president of Congo’s largest opposition party, and Martin Fayulu, a former Exxon Mobil manager and national lawmaker.

NAN reports that according to the constitution, the second and final term of President Kabila expired on Dec. 20, 2016.

General elections were originally scheduled for Nov. 2,  2016, but were delayed with a promise to hold them by the end of 2017.

This promise was subsequently broken, but after both international and internal pressure, the elections were finally scheduled for Dec. 23.

They were, however, postponed for a week on Dec. 20, due to a fire in the electoral commission’s warehouse in Kinshasa destroying 8,000 Electronic Voting Machines.

Seven opposition leaders, including Jean-Pierre Bemba and Moïse Katumbi, nominated Martin Fayulu as their candidate for president.

However, Félix Tshisekedi and Vital Kamerhe soon after broke this agreement and agreed that Tshisekedi should run for president while Kamerhe would serve as his campaign manager and become Prime Minister if he won.

They also agreed that Tshisekedi and his party will back a candidate from Kamerhe’s Union for the Congolese Nation in the 2023 presidential elections.

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