12 October 2007
Maputo — Mozambique's National Elections Commission (CNE) may hold the South African company that supplied computer equipment for the current voter registration responsible for the delays and breakdowns that have characterised the work ever since it began, on 24 September.
Speaking to Mozambican Television (TVM), CNE spokesperson Juvenal Bucuane recognised the constraints facing the voter registration brigades, but suggested the South African company was to blame.
He said the CNE was sending a team to South Africa for further contacts with the company.
However, a report in Friday's issue of the independent weekly "Savana" claims that the real reason for the registration problems was the delay in paying the South Africans.
The tender to supply the equipment was launched in June and the contract was awarded to a consortium formed by the Mozambican company ELETC, and the South African firm First Technology. ELETC is led by the businessman Celso Correia whose INSITEC group recently acquired 19 per cent of the country's second largest commercial bank, the BCI-Fomento.
The ELETC/First Technology consortium won the contract because its bid was the cheapest. Using the ELETC/First Technology materials, the cost of the voter registration was 15 million US dollars. The second ranked bid would have cost 50 million dollars.
The contract was signed on 25 July, giving the consortium 60 days to supply all the material needed by the registration brigades - 3,900 computers, printers, digital cameras, digital readers for voters' fingerprints, and 11 data centres (one for each province).
ELETC/First Technology cannot be blamed for this tight timetable.
They were allowed up until 23 September to provide the Mozambican electoral bodies with the computers - yet the registration was due to start on 24 September.
To make matters worse, according to a source in the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), cited by "Savana", it took 30 days to pay the consortium the first instalment of the contractually agreed sum.
"There was a war to make the funds available, and this took up almost half the time", said the STAE source. "This held up the entire process, culminating in delays in the delivery of the material to the districts and in the training of the registration brigades".
"There were a series of errors concerned with time, and this is undermining the process", said the source.
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