Afonso Dhlakama, the leader of Mozambique's former rebel movement Renamo, has demanded that the voter registration, which took place between 28 June and 15 July, be repeated.
At a Maputo press conference on Monday Dhlakama claimed that the updating of the electoral registers had been marred by a series of problems ranging from the late arrival of material in rural areas, to computerised registers that are "completely adulterated", and citizens prevented from registering.
(Renamo did not bother to invite AIM to this press conference - due, we believe, not to any attempt to exclude the national news agency, but to Renamo's habitual disorganisation.
This report has therefore been pieced together from information in the other media).
Dhlakama claimed that the registration was "a surgical operation with the sole objective of depriving large numbers of Mozambican citizens of the elementary right of choosing their government through their votes".
He claimed that this was a way of creating "large percentages of artificial abstention" in the presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for 1-2 December. The right to vote would be held "almost exclusively by the comrades and their party political clientele", he alleged (a reference to the ruling Frelimo Party and its supporters).
The elections were starting "in the worst possible way", he alleged, and "all of us, politicians, civil society and the international community have the obligation to unite our efforts to help correct it".
Dhlakama's claims are contradicted by the numbers: the target for the voter registration was that 700,000 people should register (including first time voters, people who have changed address, and people who had lost their voter card and were applying for a new one). This number looks certain to be surpassed, since every province that has so far reported says it has exceeded its targets. The larger than expected turnout is as true of Renamo strongholds such as Beira as of Frelimo ones such as Maputo.
As for people being excluded, anyone who kept their eyes open could see the long queues building up at registration posts during the last couple of days. On the final day, although the posts were supposed to close at 16.00, many kept going deep into the night, because there were still people queuing to register.
Nobody was turned away.
Reacting to Dhlakama's demands, the spokesperson for the National Elections Commission (CNE), Filipe Mandlate, said that repeating the registration was completely out of the question. "I don't see any legal basis for this", he said.
Mandlate categorically denied that there had been any shortage of registration materials. There had been slight management problems, which resulted in this or that area running out of stocks briefly - but the brigades were quickly resupplied.
Dhlakama did, however, moderate Renamo's initial opposition to registering Mozambicans living abroad as voters. Although in both the 1994 and 1999 general elections it was a Renamo veto that deprived emigrants of the right to vote, this time Dhlakama said "We defend clearly and unequivocally the holding of elections outside the country, so that all Mozambican citizens, wherever they live, may choose the rulers of this country".
But he also made the wildly impractical call to set up elections commissions in each of the foreign cities where the emigrants are to be registered.
Mandlate replied that these electoral operations are divided between the CNE and its executive wing, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), and he saw no need for any further bodies.
Dhlakama also called for the restoration of Mozambican citizenship to exiles living abroad who lost it for political reasons. This citizenship cannot be returned for the good reason that it was never taken away.
Nowadays there is no such thing as a Mozambican political exile, and it was never the practice of the Mozambican government to deprive its opponents of citizenship. Even Dhlakama himself, when he was waging war against Mozambique in alliance with first the Rhodesian, and later the South African racist regimes, was never stripped of citizenship.
Dhlakama, of course, did not give the names of any people he regarded as political exiles.
The bulk of Mozambican emigrants left the country to seek work, and are to be found on the mines and farms of South Africa.
Fonte: AIM
