Mozambique: Dhlakama Calls for Elections to Be Postponed

24 July 2009

Maputo — Afonso Dhlakama, leader of Mozambique's largest opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, on Friday called for the general and provincial elections scheduled for 28 October to be postponed.

He made this suggestion immediately after he had delivered his nomination papers for the presidential election to the Constitutional Council, the body that checks the eligibility of all presidential candidates.

He thus became the third candidate to register with the Constitutional Council. The others are the incumbent president and candidate of the ruling Frelimo Party, Armando Guebuza, and the mayor of Beira, and leader of the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), Daviz Simango.

Dhlakama used alleged problems with the current voter registration to justify his call for a postponement.

"There are no voters, because there is no voter registration", he said. "I don't know who is maintaining those machines which don't work, because we know that the machines brought by STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat) and the maintenance of the machines are from the company of my brother Armando Emilio Guebuza. I am making a serious accusation, and I have proof".

Dhlakama added "we warned in 2007 that those machines would be no good. We would like the Mozambican press not to treat this question as propaganda against Guebuza or against Frelimo. The truth is that we are concerned because we don't have any voters".

But Dhlakama did not present the proof that he promised. Far from there being "no voters", the great majority of the Mozambican electorate was registered in 2007 and 2008. STAE registered 9.3 million voters in those years, and Renamo has not disputed that figure.

The current registration is an update, essentially for people who reach the voting age of 18 on or before 28 October. STAE's target was to register 483,000 people and, according to STAE general director Felisberto Naife, over 60 per cent of this target (almost 300,000 new voters) had been reached by 19 July.

There are thus some 9.6 million names on the voter's roll - and from the 2007 census data we know that the total potential electorate in Mozambique cannot be more than 10.75 million.

As the company supposedly owned by President Guebuza, Dhlakama did not mention its name. But the tender to supply the computers and other digital equipment to STAE in 2007 was won by a consortium formed by the Mozambican Insitec Group, Phase Technology (an American company with a delegation in South Africa), and the Mozambican company Escopil. This year, STAE acquired batteries and other spare parts for the machines from Phase Technology and Escopil.

As far as AIM is aware, Guebuza does not own, or hold shares in any of these companies, and when AIM put Dhlakama's suggestion to a senior electoral official on Friday evening, he just burst out laughing.

Escopil is an industrial and computer maintenance company, which has done work for some of the biggest names in the Mozambican economy, including the MOZAL aluminium smelter, the Maragra sugar mill, and the Companhia Industrial de Matola, the country's largest food processing plant.

Insitec holds 18 per cent of the country's second largest commercial bank, the BCI, and one of the Insitec companies, Energia Capital, is a partner in the construction of a new dam on the Zambezi at Mphanda Nkuwa.

These are not the sort of companies that are likely to connive at deliberate sabotage of voter registration.

Using the argument that "there are no voters", Dhlakama called for the registration to be replanned., so that it could be done "decently".
"I'm not worried about the date, my brothers", he said. "An event as important as elections must be prepared very well".

Dhlakama even offered to pay for journalists to visit the provinces "and you will see there is no registration. If it's like this, then it's better to say there are no elections"./.