1 December 2008
Maputo — Opposition political parties have lodged 67 complaints related to Mozambique's local elections held on 19 November.
Interviewed on Sunday by the independent television station STV, the spokesperson for the National Elections Commission (CNE), Juvenal Bucuane, said that the CNE's legal sub-commission was going through the complaints, most of which come from the former rebel movement Renamo.
Bucuane rejected allegations that the elections, won in almost all municipalities by the ruling Frelimo Party, had been fraudulent. "All the work was done very carefully", he said, "despite some constraints that were experienced in some municipalities, but which cannot be regarded as fraudulent".
It is known that a couple of the complaints concern discrepancies in the "intermediate count" done by district and city elections commissions. The first count was done by staff at the polling stations immediately after polls closed, and the results sheets ("editais") were posted on the polling station walls.
Based on the editais, the Electoral Observatory, the main grouping of domestic election observers, has been able to undertake a parallel count in 13 municipalities.
In two cases, the cities of Beira and Nacala, the parallel count is sharply divergent from the official "intermediate count", based on exactly the same editais. The charitable interpretation of this is that mathematical mistakes have been made by the Beira and Nacala election commissions in adding up the 260 Beira and 99 Nacala editais.
Not only the Electoral Observatory, but also the provisional count done by the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), indicates that the Frelimo candidate for Mayor of Nacala, Chale Ossufo, has fallen just short of 50 per cent of the vote, and so a second round must be held between Ossufo and his main rival, the current mayor and Renamo candidate, Manuel dos Santos. But the Nacala Elections Commission gave Ossufo over 50 per cent of the vote, which would avoid a second round.
In Beira, the Electoral Observatory and STAE counts suggest that no party has a majority in the Beira municipal assembly. The Electoral Observatory count puts Frelimo as the largest party in the Assembly, but with only 41 per cent of the vote. But the Beira City Elections Commission gave Frelimo a startling 52.7 per cent of the vote.
The discrepancy becomes all the more peculiar when one notes that all the counts agree that the Beira mayoral election was won by independent candidate (and current mayor) Daviz Simango with 62 per cent of the vote.
The CNE should be able to correct any mathematical mistakes. It now has all the editais from the 43 municipalities, which were computerized and put onto CD-ROMS in the provincial capitals. The CD-ROMS were all in Maputo by Thursday, and since then the CNE has been verifying their contents. This should allow the CNE to announce final results within a day or two.
Pf/ (481)
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
