Maputo, 8 Feb (AIM) – Voter registration equipment has now been placed in most of Mozambique’s provinces, ahead of the presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections scheduled for 9 October, according to the National Elections Commission (CNE).
Speaking at a Maputo press conference on Wednesday, the CNE spokesperson, Paulo Cuinica, said “the material for the registration is already in most of the provinces. We have recruited election agents and they will be trained as from next week”.
Under the CNE’s original calendar, voter registration would have begun on 1 February. But since February is the peak of the rainy season, this was regarded as wildly impractical.
In January, the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, altered the electoral legislation, making it possible to postpone the registration. The new dates for voter registration are from 15 March to 28 April.
Registration among the Mozambican diaspora will take place from 30 March to 28 April.
Citizens wishing to contest the Presidential election should submit their nomination papers to the Constitutional Council between 13 May and 10 June. The Council must examine the nomination papers closely, and will give its decision between 11 and 25 June. The main hurdle is that each would-be presidential candidate must provide at least 10,000 signatures of supporters, each recognized by a notary
At the last presidential election, in 2019 the only parties able to present valid candidates were the ruling Frelimo Party, and the two main opposition forces, Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM).
As for financing the elections, Cuinica said that the resources would be made available “gradually” by the government and its partners. Since the date of the elections has been fixed, he added, the government was well aware that it should make the necessary effort to ensure that everything runs smoothly “without any upsets”.
“We have the experience of last year’s municipal elections”, he said. “We worked, the money was made available and the elections were held. It won’t be very different this year. We shall continue to work with the available resources”.
But he gave no figures on how much money the election bodies already have and how much will be needed.
The election calendar is still beset with problems, resulting from the piecemeal way in which the legislation has been composed over many years. Despite repeated calls by the Constitutional Council for an electoral code to replace the many scattered pieces of legislation, the hard work needed to draft such a code has never been done.
One problem that has now become apparent is that the CNE must announce the number of parliamentary candidates that political parties should submit before it knows the results of the voter registration.
The number of seats in each constituency (provinces in the case of the parliamentary election and districts for the provincial election) depends on the number of registered voters. Political party lists of candidates must be for the full number of seats in a constituency plus at least three supplementary candidates.
But the law also requires that the number of seats be announced 180 days before the election. The CNE says that this announcement will be made by 18 April – which is before voter registration has been completed.
Overcoming this problem may require another extraordinary sitting of parliament, just to change a date in the election law.
(AIM)
Pf/ (560)
