Only 34 per cent of Mozambicans have an identity card

Maputo, 12 Jun (AIM) – Only 34 per cent of adult Mozambican citizens have an identity card, even though 55 per cent have a birth certificate, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

According to the head of IOM in Mozambique, Laura Tomm-Bonde, who revealed the data on Tuesday, at the opening of the Second Regional Conference on Legal Identity, a two-day event taking place in Maputo, under the slogan “International Migration and Consular Support to Facilitate Global and Regular Mobility”, the extreme violence carried out by islamist terrorists, over the last six years, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado is one of the factors that has worsened the situation, especially for vulnerable populations.

The poor rate of identity card coverage “should arouse our empathy and motivate us to continue our joint efforts because legal identity, more than a bureaucratic necessity, is a fundamental human right that profoundly impacts the lives of individuals. It is the key to accessing a myriad of services and protections, ranging from education and health to employment and social security”, she said.

Tomm-Bonde argued that it is through legal identity that citizens may access essential services or carry out everyday activities, and “without a recognized legal identity, people are often excluded from fully participating in society and accessing vital resources, severely hampering their ability to enjoy their rights.”

For her part, the United Nations resident coordinator in Mozambique, Catherine Sozi, also emphasized the importance of identity for the lives of all citizens.

“Legal identity is indispensable for people to have access to rights, services, protection and assistance. A legal identity for all is fundamental to achieving the sustainable development goals and building a safer, more peaceful and resilient world. Legal identity is essential for a full and dignified life”, she said.

The French ambassador to Mozambique, Yann Pradeau, acknowledged that the country still has a lot to do, but admitted that there is a need to modernize the way it provides services.

“Mozambique is a key player in multilateral efforts to achieve universal access to legal identity. The country has made significant progress in modernizing its civil registration system, but there is still much to be done and only collectively will we be able to respond to this colossal but crucial challenge for development”, he said.

In order to improve the situation, he said, France has been supporting the project aimed at issuing civil registration documents to displaced people in Cabo Delgado.

The project in question, which is carried out by OIM, underway since the beginning of this year, was funded by France to the tune of 100,000 Euros (107,000 US dollars, at the current exchange rate).

The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation (MINEC), Francisco Novela, claimed that legal identity is a regional problem and urged the countries of the region and partners to work to eradicate it.

“Legal identity is a problem that affects all the countries in the SADC region. We therefore believe it is important for the IOM to create the necessary conditions for the region to engage in in-depth debates, marking a new page in the history of legal identity, facilitating the movement of people free from identity-related constraints”, he said.

All these eminent speakers ignored the basic fact that, when it wants to issue identity documents, the Mozambican government can do so with remarkable efficiency.

Every five years, the entire Mozambican electorate is registered and issued with voter cards. The voter registration exercise in 2023 and this year resulted in the issuing of about 17 million voter cards.

Yet, after the general elections scheduled for 9 October, those voter cards will lose their validity and will become so much scrap paper. For the next election cycle, in 2028-2029, the entire electorate must once again be registered from scratch.

A Mozambican citizen who attained the voting age of 18 at the time of the first multi-party elections, in 1994, will by now have received no fewer than seven voter cards, six of which are now completely useless.

This extraordinarily wasteful and expensive exercise was demanded by the former rebel movement Renamo in 1994, on the absurd grounds that, without complete re-registration of the electorate, the ruling Frelimo Party would smuggle vast numbers of foreigners in from neighbouring states to vote.

That initial justification has faded away, but complete re-registration of the electorate has remained a characteristic of every electoral law passed since then.

If the effort wasted on issuing voter cards every five years were to be spent on issuing every citizen with an identity card on attaining his or her 18th birthday, a great deal of time, effort and money would be saved.

There would be no need for a separate voter card – citizens would just show their identity card at the polling stations, and the question of legal identity would be solved.

(AIM)

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