Maputo — The Defence Ministry claims that the pace of registration of young Mozambicans for military service has picked up in Maputo city and province, but it is still woefully uninformed as to how many people of military age there are in the country.
Jose Salomao, the head of military registration in Maputo urban district number one, told AIM on Thursday that, since registration began on 2 January, his brigade has registered rather more than 600 people. "On Wednesday we registered 25 young people, and by midday today we registered 23", he said. This compared with three to six people registering per day in early January.
There are signs of a similar increase in registration in other posts in Maputo and the neighbouring city of Matola.
Even so, this improvement is grossly insufficient to come anywhere near registering all 18 year olds in the two cities. Between 2 January and 28 February, every Mozambican, man or woman, who celebrates his or her 18th birthday this year, should register. The armed forces (FADM) later select those whom they wish to call up for conscription.
But judging by previous years, 90 per cent or more of 18 year olds will ignore the registration. Worse still, the Defence Ministry will not realise how serious a fiasco registration has been because it has no idea how many people turn 18 every year.
On Thursday officers told AIM that the total number of 18 year olds in the country is about 280,000.
Wrong. And there is no excuse for getting it wrong, since a population census was undertaken in 1997. To find out how many 18 year olds there are in Mozambique, one just looks at how many 12 year olds were counted in 1997 and then adjust the figure to take the death rate into account.
AIM has done the simple calculations required. The census counted 410,371 people aged 12. A later coverage survey showed that the census counted 94.9 per cent of the population.
Adjusting for this, we find that in 1997 there were 432,424 Mozambicans aged 12. From the figures on mortality in the census, we can estimate that around 13,500 of these have died in the following six years.
So the number of Mozambicans who turn 18 in 2003 can be calculated at about 424,000.
