This was not unexpected. Renamo has never accepted the results of any Mozambican elections. Even the first multi-party elections, in 1994, described by the United Nations representative of the time, Aldo Ajello, as “the best elections ever held in Africa” were rejected as fraudulent by Renamo.
At a Maputo press conference on Thursday, Antonio Muchanga, the spokesperson for Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama, cited a string of problems and irregularities, some of which had already been reported in the Mozambican media, and some of which were new.
He claimed that in Beira, near the Macombe Primary School, a bag containing ballot papers was found in the possession of an unnamed individual, but the person who denounced this was shot by the police.
“Instead of the police neutralizing the person who was illegally carrying ballot papers, they shot the whistle-blower”, Muchanga claimed. But this incident, as far as AIM is aware, has never been mentioned by anybody else.
Muchanga also mentioned the clashes in parts of Beira and Nampula on Wednesday night between gangs of Renamo sympathisers and the police.
He claimed, accurately enough, that several attempts to slip additional ballot papers into the ballot boxes had been detected – some of these attempted frauds had been successful while others failed.
He alleged that “when the relevant authorities were informed, they refused to act”. However, the press has reported cases where the authors of attempted fraud were arrested – notably a polling station chairperson in Domue, in Angonia district, in the western province of Tete.
Muchanga claimed that the appearance of pre-marked ballot papers proved there was insufficient control and “a parallel administration”. He also alleged that in Tocole, in Nampula province, there were cases of people who had voted more than once. In Alto Molocue district, in Zambezia province, there were polling stations which did not open because they had no electoral register.
One serious obstacle to taking these complaints seriously is that Renamo is part of the electoral bodies. As a result of Renamo’s renewed insurgency in the central province of Sofala in 2013, the government, and the Frelimo majority in parliament, caved in to Renamo demands for sweeping changes in the electoral legislation.
The electoral laws were amended in February in order to give the parliamentary political parties (Frelimo. Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement, MDM) a dominant role in the electoral bodies at all levels. There are now Renamo appointees not only on the National, Provincial and District Elections Commissions, but at every level of the executive body, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE). In the central, provincial, district and city branches of STAE there are Renamo deputy directors, and Renamo members of staff.
Frelimo, Renamo and the MDM also had the right to appoint a member of staff to every one of the 17,010 polling stations, in addition to one full and one supplementary polling station monitor.
Muchanga complained that many of the Renamo monitors were not accredited in time. But when this was put on Thursday to Paulo Cuinica, spokesperson of the National Elections Commission (CNE), he said that parties put in their lists of monitors late. The lists should have been delivered up to 20 days before the election – but some names were still being submitted on 14 October, the day before polling.
The Frelimo Central Committee Secretary for Mobilisation and Propaganda, Damiao Jose, dismissed Muchanga’s complaints. He said the irregularities mentioned did not call into question the overall election results.
“For Frelimo, the elections took place in an orderly, peaceful and transparent manner”, he said.
The parallel count undertaken by the Electoral Observatory, the largest and most credible group of domestic election observers, shows that Renamo has done much better in these elections than expected.
Dhlakama was not penalized for leading a murderous insurrection: instead his share of the vote has doubled, when compared with the previous election, in 2009. The parallel count gives him 32 per cent.
The Frelimo candidate, Filipe Nyusi, is projected to win the election with around 60.5 per cent. Since the 2009 Frelimo candidate, the incumbent president Armando Guebuza, won with 75 per cent of the vote, the Frelimo majority has been slashed.
Post published in: Africa News