RENAMO NO LONGER INSISTING ON DELAYING REGISTRATION

Mozambique’s former rebel movement Renamo is no longer insisting on a further delay in voter registration, according to the party’s national spokesperson, Fernando Mazanga, cited in Monday’s issue of the independent newsheet “Mediafax”.Renamo had already succeeded in postponing the start of registration from 30 January to 15 February. At a session of the dialogue between the government and Renamo last Thursday, less than 48 hours before the registration was due to begin, the head of the Renamo delegation, Saimone Macuana, called for a further postponement of 10 days.That would have required consultation between the government and the National Elections Commission (CNE) on Friday, followed by an emergency session of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet) to issue a decree changing the date.The government successfully called Renamo’s bluff, and the registration began as planned on Saturday.Mazanga told “Mediafax” that “in a game of democratic negotiations, one cannot only expect to take. One has to give in order to take”.“Although our request has not been granted, we are not going to insist”, he said.He thought it would have been “logical” to delay registration so that when it began, it would be governed by “the new law”. But there is no “new law”: instead, there is a series of concessions wrung out of the government by Renamo and involving the complete politicisation of the electoral bodies, notably the placing of a small army of political appointees at every level of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the electoral branch of the civil service. It remains to be seen whether the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, will approve this.Despite Renamo’s disappointment, Mazanga said his party is mobilising its supporters to go to the registration posts and register as voters. But registration got off to a slow start at the weekend, with only a trickle of citizens making their way to the registration posts to acquire their voter cards. Heavy rains in parts of the country made it impossible to open many posts – even in cities such as Beira and Quelimane, according to correspondents for the “Mozambique Political Process Bulletin”, published by the anti-corruption NGO, the Centre for Public Integrity (CIP).Worst hit is the central province of Sofala. According to the director of the Sofala branch of STAE, Celso Chimoio, speaking to reporters in Beira, it was only possible to place 211 of the 320 Sofala brigades at their posts in time to start the registration on Saturday.The rains have affected mobility in the Sofala districts of Machanga, Dondo, Marromeu, Cheringoma, Buzi and in Beira itself.Registration has also not yet started in the three districts worst affected by the raids and ambushes undertaken by Renamo gunmen – Gorongosa, Maringue and Chibabava. Chimoio said the registration material had been sent to the district capitals, but STAE had left the opening of the posts to the discretion of the local authorities, who were to judge whether it was safe to open them.A further problem lay with equipment failures. The Bulletin’s correspondents knew of 16 posts, scattered across the country, where the brigades could not begin work because their computers or printers malfunctioned. Lack of electricity also kept some brigades in enforced idleness. The registration posts are supposed to have generators – but the Bulletin knew of 48 cases where the lack of generators stopped the posts from opening.In all, there should be 4,078 voter registration brigades in the country, each formed by three people.STAE headquarters in Maputo told AIM on Monday morning that it was currently compiling statistics from all the provinces, and should know by mid-afternoon exactly how many registration posts had been unable to open.