2 January 2008
Maputo — Once again, the Mozambican Defence Ministry is assuming that less than half the young Mozambicans who should register for military service this year will actually do so.
Registration begins on Wednesday and will last until 29 February. All Mozambicans, of both sexes, who celebrate their eighteenth birthday this year, are legally obliged to register. People who turn 18 this year were aged seven in 1997, and the population census of that year counted 459,540 seven year olds.
Yet the Defence Ministry's target this year is to register only 201,000 people, or just 44 per cent of the number indicated by the census. (A better indication would be given by the 2007 census - but the full results from that census have yet to be published).
On registration, citizens are supposed to bring their identity document, a declaration of their academic qualifications, and a declaration of residence issued by the local authorities. However, many people living in the Mozambican countryside own neither a passport nor an identity card - which is why alternative forms of identification, such as recognition by traditional or religious leaders, are permitted under the country's electoral legislation.
Clearly, the Defence Ministry is concentrating its efforts on urban youth. It expects to register 70,000 people in Maputo city, or 35 per cent of the total - although the capital city only contains 5.4 per cent of the total Mozambican population.
The military registration is an enormous exercise with a tiny outcome. For the Mozambican armed forces (FADM) do not have the logistical capacity to cope with more than a couple of thousand new recruits per year.
Thus in 2007, according to a Defence Ministry document cited in Wednesday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias", the FADM trained 1,957 recruits, at just two training centres (in Montepuez, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, and in Manhica, in Maputo province).
Theoretically, people who do not register for military service face sanctions. But the only real sanction is that people over 18 applying for passports will not be granted them unless they can show that they have registered.
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