(LUANDA) - Angola on Friday staged its first peacetime election but European Union observers said the organisation of the poll in Africa's new oil boom nation was a "disaster".

Six years after the end of a 27-year civil war that left at least 500,000 people dead, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos' Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) is expected to retain its three decade old grip on power. The opposition has said the election is unfair.

Voters waited in lines outside white tents across the capital Luanda that served as polling stations. Dos Santos did not speak after voting but made a V-sign to waiting cameras and photographers.

Many polling stations in the capital opened late however and did not have voter lists.

"What we have seen in the three polling stations we have visited in Luanda, is a disaster. They have not started voting yet. They did not prepare," EU observer mission chief Luisa Morgantini said.

At one polling station in the Maianga neighbourhood of the capital where there was no list, poll workers took down registration numbers so people could vote and be ticked off the list later.

"The efficiency that we have seen during the campaign, you don't see it on the ground. You see confusion," the EU mission chief said.

In the bustling low-income neighbourhood of Samba election officials fought over chairs and tables as they set up the tents for polling.

Despite the confusion in Luanda where over 20 percent of the eight million voters are registered, the landmark event appeared to go more smoothly in the rest of the country. The day has been declared a national holiday.

"In Luanda things are starting slowly and late but our teams in different region say things are on time," Mussa Idriss Ndele from a pan-African parliament observer mission said.

Despite Angola's new wealth from its vast oil and diamond wealth, most of the 17 million people remain mired in poverty, living on less than two dollars a day.

In Maianga, 26-year-old medical student Iracema Antonio impatiently waited in line to vote. "I haven't slept. I'm very excited, this election means a lot in Angola," she told AFP.

Angola held one attempted election in 1992 but the opposition National Union for the Total Independence of Angola claimed it was fixed, withdrew and new hostilities started.

Remembering the failed 1992 vote, Antonio said there had been "a lot of hope and high expectations that things would change and it ended up being the opposite."

Because of that "people are also fearful of these elections but I'm not worried," she said.

UNITA and rights groups have complained that MPLA has massive state funding and access to the media.

The ruling party's control of the oil and diamond industries has given the fragmented political opposition little room to build support since 2002 when a peace deal ended the civil war.

Yet while UNITA has promised to distribute wealth more equally, many Angolans believe that only the MPLA is powerful enough to make the changes they long for.

Proudly displaying his blue finger, stamped in ink to prevent fraud, Costa Bundu told AFP he voted MPLA.

"I feel very good voting in my country and appointing the party in my heart," he said.

The MPLA was originally a Marxist-Leninist group but is now nominally social democratic.

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