Maputo — Mozambique's Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE) has guaranteed that everything is ready for municipal elections on Wednesday in all of the country's 65 municipalities.
Aircraft were used to take the voting materials and the polling station staff (MMVs) to areas in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where overland transport was deemed unsafe. The districts dependent on air transport are Mocimboa da Praia, Ibo and Mueda,
There will be 6,785 polling stations with a total of 47,495 MMVs. There should be seven MMVs per station. Three of these are appointed by the three parties represented in parliament (the ruling Frelimo Party, and the two opposition forces, Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement, MDM), while the other four are supposed to be recruited through the standard public administration procedures.
STAE has registered over 21,600 election observers (20,311 national observers and 80 foreigners). 868 journalists have been accredited to cover the elections.
4.8 million voters have been registered. They will vote for the 65 municipal assemblies, which contain a total of 1,747 seats.
The voters no longer vote directly for the mayor. Instead the head of the list of whichever party wins the most votes will automatically become the mayor. 22 parties, coalitions and citizens' groups are competing - but only Frelimo, Renamo and the MDM are standing in all 65 municipalities,
There are fears that Frelimo is trying to ensure that the polling stations are staffed by MMVs favourable to its candidates.
Thus a list of MMVs in the southern city of Matola, obtained by the anti-corruption NGO, the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP), shows that the positions of chairperson, deputy chairperson, secretary and fourth scrutineer in the polling stations all come from Frelimo, which could give it a decisive advantage.
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Some of the polling station chairpersons are civil servants from provincial directorates and even members of Frelimo Party zone committees. CIP says the chairperson in one polling station, at the 24th July Complete Primary School, works in the office of the Maputo Provincial Governor, Julio Parruque, who is now the head of the Frelimo list (and hence the mayoral candidate) for Matola.
STAE has also issued an instruction that, after they have cast their votes, citizen must leave the polling stations. This is clearly stated in the electoral legislation, which was passed unanimously by the Mozambican parliament, including by its Renamo members.
But several Renamo politicians, notably the mayor of the central city of Quelimane, Manuel de Araujo, have vociferously called on voters to stay at the polling stations after voting, supposedly to "control the vote' and prevent any fraud.
Previous elections have shown that gathering large numbers of people in the vicinity of a polling station controls nothing, but is a recipe for disturbances and even rioting. Most polling stations are inside the cramped space of school classrooms, where the presence of more than a couple of dozen people would clearly be impossible.
Opposition parties can "control the vote' through the MMVs they are entitled to appoint, and through registered monitors they can station at each polling station. These are the anti-fraud measures the opposition itself voted for, when it passed the electoral laws.
