1 July 2009
Maputo — The chairperson of Mozambique's National Elections Commission (CNE), Leopoldo da Costa, on Tuesday warned new members of the Sofala Provincial and Beira City Elections Commissions to refrain from political activities that have nothing to do with their tasks as electoral officials.
Cited in the Beira daily paper "Diario de Mocambique", Costa declared that the task of the election commissions is to run the forthcoming presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections with the maximum fairness and independence.
"Here none of you are delegates of any political party", he said. "No commission member is an agent of a political party. Here we have one, and only one, mission: to act as referees in the game called elections, and not to take any interest in the character of any of the players".
He added that when election commission members failed to act in an independent manner, "instead of handling problems, we become part of the problem". Electoral bodies, he stressed, owe obedience only to the law.
Costa's warning is pertinent, because most of the new appointments have come about, not because members of the commissions have died or retired, but because the former rebel movement Renamo is changing its nominees on the electoral bodies.
Each provincial, district and city election commission consists of 11 members - five from the two parties represented in parliament (three appointed by the ruling Frelimo Party and two by Renamo), and six from civil society organisations. The commissions were set up in mid-2007, and were supposed to remain in place until 2010.
Yet Renamo has decided to change its nominees in Sofala, thus making a mockery of the claim that these commission members are independent and no longer represent their parties. Beira journalists suspected that the changes resulted from last year's split in Renamo, which gave rise to a new opposition party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), led by the mayor of Beira, Daviz Simango.
Was Renamo purging from the commissions people it suspected were Simango sympathizers? The Renamo Sofala provincial delegate, Fernando Mbararano, denied this and claimed the changes were "a response to some internal reforms within the party". He added that similar changes would occur in the composition of several of the Sofala district election commissions.
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