The general director of the electoral branch of the Mozambican civil service, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), Antonio Carrasco, has confirmed that his institution is facing financial constraints, but he says this will not affect the preparations for the general elections, due towards the end of this year.
It is feared that, if these financial problems are not dealt with immediately, this may jeopardise the updating in June of the electoral registers, and the programmes of voter education.
Interviewed in Thursday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias", Carrasco said that this problem has been reported to the government and STAE hopes that it will be overcome within the next few days.
He said that, despite these constraints, STAE has been managing the situation, and the training of staff for civic education and for updating the registers has been running normally.
"We are suffering financial constraints, but we have been managing the situation with what little money we have", Carrasco said. "At the moment, we have courses to train the members of the voter registration and civic education brigades, which are running normally", he said.
He added that the current financial problem "will not affect in any way the electoral calendar".
Civic education and voter registration is budgeted at 66 billion meticais (about 2.27 million US dollars).
Voter registration will be undertaken by 2,494 brigades, and will take 21 days, starting on 15 June. STAE says there are about 700,000 people to be registered.
Alarmist claims have been made that this is a gross under- estimate, and that the real figure should be in the millions. That is quite impossible, and AIM calculates that there are, at most half a million or so potential voters to be registered.
Essentially there are three categories of people to be registered - those who reach voting age (18) in 2004, those who have lost their voting card, and those who have changed their address.
From the census of 1997, we know how many 18 year olds there are in the country. Someone who turns 18 this year was 11 in 1997, and the census counted 329,483 11 year olds.
In last year's update of the registers, 522,597 people applied for new cards on the grounds that they had lost the old ones. But that update covered the period 1999-2003, since the registers had been untouched since the total registration of the electorate in 1999.
So the average number of people who lost their cards was 130,149 per year. There is no reason to think this figure will be any larger in 2004 - in fact, it will probably be much smaller, since the 2003 figure included all those who had lost their documents in the floods of 2000 and 2001.
We can apply the same reasoning to the number of people who have changed address. In 2003 the brigades registered 233,497 voters who had changed address - those changes had also occurred over a four year period, and so the average was 50,376 per year.
There is a fourth category - those who, for whatever reason, did not register in 2003 or in 1999. But since they did not register then, there is no good reason to think that they will do so now. Perhaps a few thousand will do so: they will then offset some of the thousands of 18 year olds who will not bother to register. Thus they do not affect the calculations much.
On the basis of the above figures, AIM calculates that the maximum number of voters to be registered in June is 330,000 plus 130,000 plus 60,000 - which totals 520,000. So if STAE has enough registration materials for 700,000 new voters that will be more than enough.
Fonte: AIM
