Maputo — The ballot papers, ballot boxes and other voting materials for the general and provincial elections scheduled for 28 October are already in the provincial capitals in northern and central Mozambique, and the materials for the south of the country will arrive by Sunday, according to the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service.

STAE general director Felisberto Naife told a Maputo press conference on Thursday that the material will be distributed to the districts and localities as from Sunday. For areas where access is particularly difficult, STAE has hired four helicopters, which will arrive in the country on Monday.

Naife was confident that with ten days available, all the logistical problems involved in transporting the voting materials to more than 12,000 polling stations can be overcome.

The tender to produce the voting materials was won by the Mozambican companies SOTUX and Academica, who then sub-contracted South African companies. Naife said he had personally visited South Africa earlier this week to observe the packaging of the voting materials.

These materials include the transparent ballot boxes, the ballot papers, the voting booths, the forms for results sheets and polling station minutes, the indelible ink to stain voters' fingers so that nobody can vote twice, and oil lamps for those areas that have no electricity.

If the deadlines established by STAE are met, then the embarrassing blunders of the 2004 elections can be avoided. In 2004, a substantial number of voters were disenfranchised because some polling stations did not receive voting material. In some cases this was because of heavy rains, but in others the electoral registers did not arrive, or the wrong ones were sent.

Naife also announced that on Friday the second stage of training for polling station staff, involving about 100,000 people, will begin. Of the 100,000 trainees, only 88,858 will work in the 12,694 polling stations (seven per station).

Observers and journalists are now being accredited. So far, Naife said, 1,046 observers have been accredited. 972 of these are Mozambican observers. Of the 174 international observers, 111 are from the European Union and 63 from the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme).

565 journalists from the Mozambican media have been accredited to date, and there are requests for accreditation from 32 foreign journalists.