Maputo — As of last Friday, 10 July, the voter registration brigades operating throughout Mozambique had registered 144,143 new voters, according to data provided to AIM on Thursday by the press office of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service.

The registration started on 15 June, and is scheduled to end on 29 July. If registration continues at the current pace, the final figure for new voters will be about 250,000. However, all past experience shows that many people leave voter registration to the last moment, so an influx of potential voters can be expected in the last few days.

The provincial breakdown of the registration in the first 26 days is as follows:

Niassa - 6,959 Cabo Delgado - 12,422 Nampula - 16,058 Zambezia - 13,646 Tete - 9,923 Manica - 16,518 Sofala - 13,987 Inhambane - 10,225 Gaza - 9.836 Maputo Province - 12,812 Maputo City - 18,732

These figures do not include people who have been issued new cards because their old ones were lost or damaged, or people who transferred their registration from one part of the country to another.

STAE's target for the registration is 483,150 new voters. The target is quite unrealistic, since it assumes that everybody who attains the voting age of 18 before 28 October, the date of the presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections, will attempt to register. But in no country in the world do all citizens of voting age bother to register.

As a result of the complete re-registration of the electorate in late 2007 and early 2008, and the update of the registers in mid-2008 ahead of the municipal elections held in November, there are already over 9.3 million registered voters in Mozambique. Even if the current voter registration only adds a further 250,000, that will mean a registered electorate of over 9.5 million.

Based on the data from the 2007 population census, the current Mozambican population can be estimated at about 21.5 million. Since the age structure of the population is massively skewed towards the younger end, at most 50 per cent is of voting age. Thus a registered electorate of 9.5 million would be over 85 per cent of the total potential electorate.

STAE press officer Lucas Jose told AIM categorically that all the voter registration posts have opened. This contrasts with claims by the former rebel movement Renamo that hundreds of posts have not opened, and that STAE is therefore depriving large numbers of Mozambicans of the right to vote.

There are 5,625 registration posts - but not all of these can be permanently open, since there are only 3,263 registration brigades. In the sparsely populated parts of the country, the potential voters are served by mobile brigades.

STAE general director Felisberto Naife pointed out this constraint in an interview last week, when he said "with this arrangement, we obviously cannot have all the posts functioning at the same time. 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.

Many brigades have faced problems with breakdowns in the digital equipment used for the registration. Jose said that STAE has technical teams in all 11 provinces to deal with these breakdowns. Replacement batteries and other spare parts have been sent to the areas where they are needed.

But some problems reported have nothing to do with the machinery, but are caused by sheer negligence of local staff. Thus the Beira daily paper "Diario de Mocambique" reported that two brigades in Beira schools stopped work for several days because the schools had no electricity to recharge the batteries. This was because somebody had neglected to buy the pre-paid cards needed for the "Credelec" (pay-as-you-use) electricity system.

Jose said there was not much the STAE headquarters can do about this. The local STAE branch in Beira should have dealt with this at once, and certainly had the money to do so.

As for the candidates, so far there is only one - the current President, Armando Guebuza, is the only person who has delivered his nomination papers for the presidential election, and nobody at all has delivered nomination papers for the parliamentary or provincial elections.

Nine parties, coalitions and citizens' groups, however, had, as of Thursday afternoon, registered to take part in the elections. They include Renamo, the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM - which results from a split in Renamo), the Labour Party (PT), and two ecological parties. OCINA (Organisation of Nacala Independent Candidates) has registered for the provincial elections in Nampula.

There are also two hitherto unknown organisations, the United Coalition for Mozambique, and the United Mozambican Party for Democratic Freedom. AIM does not yet have any information on the composition of these groups.

The ruling Frelimo Party held inner-party elections to choose its parliamentary candidates earlier this month, and says it is assembling all the documents for their nomination papers, which will be deposited at the same time as Frelimo formally registers for the elections.

Renamo says it has also selected its candidates, but, unlike Frelimo, it has not announced who they are.

The closing date for nominations is 29 July.

Pf/ (875)