11 November 2009
Maputo — Afonso Dhlakama, leader of Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, has demanded that the Electoral Observatory, the main grouping of domestic election observers, should be outlawed.
Last Thursday, leaders of the Observatory traveled to the northern city of Nampula, where Dhlakama is currently living, and gave him a copy of its preliminary report on the general elections held on 28 October.
Apparently Dhlakama did not like what he read - for the Observatory parallel count confirmed the polling station counts broadcast over Radio Mozambique, and the provisional count done, province by province, by the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the civil service. All the counts showed that the incumbent president, Armando Guebuza, has won, with about three quarters of the votes.
The parallel count was done from a random sample of 976 polling stations (eight per cent of the total), covering all districts, and both urban and rural areas. In the presidential election, it gave Guebuza between 74 and 76 per cent of the vote, Dhlakama about 14 per cent, and the third candidate, Daviz Simango, leader of the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), around nine per cent. The Observatory put the margin of error at around three per cent.
The Observatory had a total of 1,350 observers, accompanied by 47 provincial coordinators. Most of these were placed at the polling stations in the sample, observing events, and at the end taking down the figures from the results sheets. Many of these observers had prior experience from the 2004 elections.
At a Nampula press conference on Tuesday, Dhlakama raged against the Observatory. Its data, he claimed, was just a compilation from the results sheets - and of course the observers compiled the results sheets, since there is no other source for the number of votes cast.
He said that the report did not mention any incidents that had happened during the voting, and the report was thus "a real onslaught against democracy in the country". He said the report did not mention the deliberate invalidation of votes by members of polling station staff, nor the alleged detention of opposition polling station monitors, nor switches in electoral registers, which he claimed happened on a large scale.
Dhlakama's conclusion was that the Mozambican judicial authorities should ban the Electoral Observatory, which he claimed was at the service of Guebuza and of the ruling Frelimo Party.
But the Observatory does not consist of Frelimo functionaries - it is a coalition of the three main religious organisations in the country (the Catholic Church, the Christian Council and the Islamic Council) and a number of prominent NGOs, including the Human Rights League (LDH), which has often been strongly critical of the government. LDH chairperson Alice Mabota, accompanied the president of the Observatory, Brazao Mazula, to deliver the report to Dhlakama.
Dhlakama also reiterated his demand that the National Elections Commission (CNE) annul the elections because they were "fraudulent". If the CNE refused his demand, he warned, the country would experience "great turbulence" in the coming days.
This is somewhat less menacing than his boast that "Mozambique will burn", made by Dhlakama on his arrival in Nampula on 29 October. He said that Renamo was preparing a demonstration of protest against the results, but gave no details.
As for Dhlakama's specific claims of electoral malpractice, Renamo has yet to provide a full list of its monitors allegedly expelled from the polling stations and detained. When AIM raised this question with a member of the CNE he replied that Renamo had not made any formal protest to the electoral bodies at district, provincial or national level.
Party monitors enjoy limited immunity. They cannot be detained within the area of a polling station, unless caught in the act of committing a crime. But if the police or polling station staff act illegally towards monitors, the electoral bodies can only act if the party concerned informs them.
The switching of electoral registers presumably refers to cases where the register for one polling station turned up in error at another one. The general director of STAE, Felisberto Naife, accepts that there were a few such cases. He told AIM that, because the production of the registers has been decentralized, such mistakes only happened within districts, and were solved on the day.
This is quite unlike the scenario in 2004 where a significantly number of polling stations had no register, or a register from a different province altogether. In these cases, the only people who could vote were the polling station staff and the policemen and any journalists on duty at that station (they are the only people allowed to vote at places other than where they registered).
This meant that in 1994 there were stations where less than 10 people voted. AIM has not come across any such cases this year, in the results sheets seen so far. In the Electoral Observatory sample, there are no stations with such a small number of votes - a good indication that this year it did not happen.
There is, however, a more conspiratorial meaning to the term "switching registers", occasionally both Renamo and MDM spokesmen have suggested that there was a whole shadowy world of "false registers" which omitted some names and added others. They are, in fact, claiming that STAE carried out two registrations - the real one, and a parallel, clandestine one.
Naife dismisses this as quite impossible. On logistical grounds alone the idea is impractical. Where would STAE find the extra computers, and the extra staff to undertake this parallel registration?
The invalidation of votes by dishonest polling station staff, however, is a real issue, and STAE and CNE members admit this. Dhlakama implies that this was a generalized practice.
But if he had bothered to read the Electoral Observatory's parallel count properly, he would have been able to quantify the problem. For if staff invalidate votes, by adding an inky fingerprint to make it looks as if the voters have tried to vote for two candidates, this will show up on the results sheets as an abnormally large number of invalid votes.
In no previous presidential election has the number of invalid votes exceeded three per cent - it was 2.8 per cent in 1994, 2.9 per cent in 1999 and 2.65 per cent in 2004. So in most polling stations, one would expect invalid votes to account for between two and four per cent of the total - fewer in the better educated, urban areas, and more in the countryside.
But when the number of invalid votes in a polling station exceeds ten per cent, alarm bells should start ringing. It is clear evidence of vote tampering.
So how many stations in the Observatory sample had abnormal numbers of invalid votes? Out of the 976 stations, 63 had numbers of invalid votes in excess of 10 per cent (42 were between 10 and 20 per cent, 14 were between 20 and 30 per cent, and seven were over 30 per cent).
That is 6.5 per cent of the total. It is worryingly high, but not a general phenomenon. Over 90 per cent of the stations in the Observatory sample did not have this problem, which means that Dhlakama cannot blame the scale of his defeat on polling station staff invalidating his votes.
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