Maputo — By the end of the voter registration period on Tuesday, 85 per cent of the estimated potential electorate in Mozambique's 53 municipalities had registered, according to the final figures issued by the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE) at a Thursday press conference in Maputo.

After a dismally slow start in May, when the registration brigades were dogged by repeated equipment failures, the closing days of the registration saw a surge of voters making their way to the registration posts to pick up their new voter cards.

Out of STAE's estimated 3,598,003 municipal citizens entitled to vote, 3.058,386 registered - almost exactly 85 per cent.

Broken down by province, the most successful was Tete, where registration reached 120.3 per cent of the target.

The figures for the other provinces were:

Manica - 99.7 per cent

Cabo Delgado - 94.7 per cent

Gaza - 95.4 per cent

Inhambane - 93.9 per cent

Maputo City - 85.7 per cent

Sofala - 85.6 per cent

Maputo Province - 81.6 per cent

Nampula - 80.0 per cent

Niassa - 79.9 per cent

Zambezia - 64.4 per cent.

Within Zambezia, there were particularly poor registration rates in the municipalities of Gurue (40.5 per cent), Alto Molocue (50.9 per cent) and Mocuba (53.4 per cent). No other municipality, anywhere in the country, registered less than 70 per cent of its target.

24 municipalities registered more than 100 per cent of their target.

This included nine of the ten towns that were promoted to municipal status in May of this year - it is certainly possible that in these cases, the large registration figures simply reflect hasty mistakes made by STAE in estimating the electorate.

More puzzling are the 15 towns which were already municipalities where the registration went over 100 per cent. In these towns, based on the 2008 municipal elections (and on population figures from the 2007 census), STAE should have had much more accurate estimates.

But in Ulongue, in Tete, 247 per cent of the estimate electorate registered. In Mandlakazi (Gaza), the figure was 204 per cent, in Marrupa (Niassa) 200 per cent, in Massinga (Inhambane) 142 per cent and in Catandica (Manica) 144 per cent.

This inevitably raises questions as to whether, in these towns, significant numbers of people from outside the municipal boundaries registered in order to vote in the 20 November municipal elections.