Maputo, 21 Apr (AIM) – Mozambican President, Filipe Nyusi, has called on all eligible citizens to register as voters for the municipal elections to be held on 11 October.
Mozambican citizens who are 18 years of age or above on the date of the elections and who hold an identity card, passport or other acceptable identity document, should make their way to the registration posts set up in all districts which contain municipalities.
Registration began on Thursday and will last until 3 June. Nyusi was the first voter to register when the registration post at the Josina Machel secondary school, in central Maputo, opened at 08.00 on Thursday morning.
“I exhort all my fellow countrymen to join this process, but this has to be up to the conscience of all of us, because the democratic process means that we are all able to choose”, said the President, immediately after he had registered, in the company of his wife, Isaura Nyusi.
Nyusi congratulated the National Elections Commission (CNE) for organizing the voter registration, in the midst of many adversities.
“You can clearly see that they know what they are doing”, he said. “On average registration took nine minutes, I believe they will consider and improve much more”.
However, reports from elsewhere in the country suggest that registration brigades, unfamiliar with the equipment, are sometimes taking half an hour or more to register a single voter.
The registration process relies on 3,192 brigades, working in 4,292 voter registration posts, installed in the 65 municipalities throughout the country. Besides the fixed brigades, mobile brigades will be installed to reduce the distance between voters’ homes and the voter registration posts.
According to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE), there are 9,921,625 potential municipal voters in Mozambique.
(AIM)
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