Maputo — The Chairperson of Mozambique's National Elections Commission (CNE), Bishop Carlos Matsinhe, on Monday launched the electoral civic education campaign ahead of the 11 October municipal elections, with a call for all eligible citizens to register as voters.
Speaking in the municipality of Marracuene, about 30 kilometres north of Maputo, he stressed that registration is an indispensable pre-condition for exercising the right to vote.
Voter registration will take place from 20 April to 3 June. Each voter will be issued with a voter card that must be shown at the polling stations.
All previous voter cards, including those issued during the pilot registration held in nine districts earlier this year, are not valid for voting purposes.
The Mozambican electoral system is unwieldy, because it requires a complete re-registration of the electorate every five years. Someone who registered to vote for the first time in 1994 will by now have received six voter cards, all of which are now entirely useless. Only the card issued this year can be used.
Matsinhe considered the civic education campaign as "the start of a stage of extreme importance for the elections, in which the civic education agents will go door-to-door, and will visit markets, schools, bus stops and other places where people gather, carrying informative and educational messages about the importance of citizens participating in the elections'.
Voter registration, he insisted, "is a key factor for voting in an informed, conscious and patriotic manner'.
Matsinhe called for "minimizing the problem of abstentions'. It was thus a "fundamental goal' of civic education "to inform voters clearly about the value of voter registration and of their vote'.
"We believe it is necessary to encourage citizens and the entire electorate to participate with responsibility and maturity, and to contribute to spreading information that promotes pacification, concord, tolerance, harmony and respect for diversity', Matsinhe added.
The civic education agents, he declared, should be "faithful messengers of the message 'Zero Abstentions!' and 'Let's participate actively in the elections!'. Your performance should be exemplary, brilliant, and show to all citizens that, by participating actively in the elections, they will contribute to greater legitimacy of their representative, and the consolidation of democracy'.
