Constitutional Council declares Frelimo winner in four repeat elections

Maputo, 30 Dec (AIM) – Mozambique’s Constitutional Council, the country’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, declared on Saturday that the ruling Frelimo Party had won all four repeat municipal elections held on 10 December.

The first elections were held on 11 October, and in the municipality of Marromeu, on the south bank of the Zambezi, fraud was so pervasive that the Council annulled the entire election and ordered it held again.

In three other towns – Nacala Port, Gurue and Milange – the Council ordered a second vote in several polling stations but not in the entire municipality. In all, the second elections were held at 75 polling stations where 53,190 voters were registered.

Observer groups found the repeat elections just as irregular, if not worse, than the polls of 11 October. Many of the polling station officials implicated in the fraud of October were not replaced, and some were found in possession of ballot papers marked in advance in favour of Frelimo.

This led the Constitutional Council to call on the election management bodies to undertake “a deep reflection into the security system for election materials”. There should be “scrupulous compliance with the security rules for voting materials”.

The Council also admitted that the voter rolls at the polling stations were not always identical to the replicas given to the political parties, but did not explain how this could possibly have happened.

The Council’s ruling on the four repeat elections contains almost no details. It provides no figures for voter turnout, and does not even give the number of votes received by each of the contesting parties, only the number of seats allocated to each of them in the municipal assemblies.

Thus in the largest municipality, Nacala, Frelimo took 28 of the 47 seats, the main opposition party, Renamo, took 18, while the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) took one.

In Milange, Frelimo won 14 of the 23 Assembly seats, and Renamo took the other nine.

In Marromeu, the Council claimed that Frelimo won 11 seats and Renamo nine. It did not mention the report from the “Mais Integridade” (“More Integrity”) election observation coalition, which said the fraud in Marromeu was so serious it was impossible to determine who had won.

In Gurue, Frelimo took 22 seats, while the runner-up, with 16 seats, was the New Democracy (ND) party. Renamo won two seats and the MDM one.

Gurue is the only municipality in the country, where the ND made a strong showing. Indeed, its leader, Salomao Muchanga, claims that in reality it won a majority of seats in the Assembly, and only fraud deprived it of victory.

The Nacala result was certainly influenced by the boycott announced by the local Renamo leadership, headed by the mayor, Raul Novinte, who was running for a further term of office. So Novinte was able to claim the poor turnout at the 18 Nacala polling stations where the repeat election was held as a triumph for Renamo.

Asked about this by reporters on Saturday, the Renamo election agent, Gloria Salvador, denied that the boycott was Novinte’s initiative. “It was a decision of the people”, she claimed.

In reality, it was nothing of the sort, and was opposed by the Maputo-based Renamo leadership. The week before the election, Novinte was in Maputo for fruitless negotiations with his own party’s leadership.

In the Constitutional Council’s ruling in November on the other 61 municipalities, the Council admitted to changing the initial results given by the National Elections Commission (CNE). It transferred tens of thousands of votes that the CNE had initially given to Frelimo to Renamo and the MDM, particularly in the cities of Maputo and Matola.

But this time there was no sign of any transfer of votes, no sign that the Constitutional Council had recounted ballots in any of the four municipalities.

It simply declared that the irregularities and illegalities detected had been promptly corrected, and that the elections of 10 December had not suffered from any problems that could invalidate them.

However, the Council said it was concerned “at the deficit in the formation and consolidation of a democratic awareness among citizens, the electoral bodies, political parties, the police and other stakeholders in the elections, which has resulted in serious human, material and financial losses”.

Such losses, it said, recur in every election cycle “and do not contribute to consolidating the constitutional order and the underlying principles of the democratic rule of law”.

The Council called on “all political, social, cultural and economic sectors to build a truly democratic society which is capable of coexistence in diversity and in pluralism”.

(AIM)

Pf/ (777)