9 July 2009
Maputo — Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, is threatening legal action against the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service, over allegedly deliberate disorganization of the current voter registration - but STAE retorts that in reality the registration is going reasonably well, and problems are being ironed out.
A senior Renamo official has told AIM that the party has submitted a complaint to the Public Prosecutor's Office, and wants criminal proceedings begun against STAE. A Renamo press release earlier this week claimed that, although three of the six weeks allocated to voter registration have passed, hundreds of voter registration posts in the north of the country have not even opened.
Thus Renamo claimed that in 12 districts in Nampula province, out of the 321 posts that should be operating, only 178 were open, and 143 were not. The release added that, of 576 posts in Zambezia province, 310 were not operational.
The general director of STAE, Felisberto Naife, dismisses such claims. Cited in Monday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias", he pointed out that many of the voter registration brigades are mobile rather than fixed. There were 3,263 brigades for 5,625 registration posts.
"With this arrangement, we obviously cannot have all the posts functioning at the same time", he said. "The posts are operated by mobile brigades, which operate a little in each area". There is nothing new about this - mobile registration brigades have been used to register voters ever since the first multi-party elections of 1994.
Naife admitted that there had been problems with the digital machinery used to take photographs of the voters and issue them with voter cards. The computers used were inherited from the previous voter registration exercises (in 2007 and 2008), and Naife said that only 70 per cent of them were still working.
So sufficient new machines were imported, and accessories (including batteries, chargers and printers) to allow the brigades to work effectively, he said.
Naife claimed that, after 20 days of registration, at least 140,000 new voters have been issued with voter cards. This figure is incomplete, since STAE had not yet received information from brigades stationed in more remote parts of the country.
STAE's target is to register 483,000 new voters, who will be added to the 9.3 million who registered in 2007 and 2008. Voter registration is due to end on 29 July.
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