Mozambique: Voter registration going on ‘safely’ across Cabo Delgado – minister

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Mozambique: Voter registration going on ‘safely’ across Cabo Delgado – minister

4:55 CAT | 09 May 2023

FILE - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Integrity Magazine]

Voter registration is taking place safely in all municipalities in Cabo Delgado, in the north of Mozambique, despite the armed insurgency in the province, the country’s minister of interior, Arsénia Massingue, has announced.

“We have no alarming cases,” said the minister, Arsénia Massingue, speaking in Pemba on Monday. “In all posts we have security guaranteed by the police [who] are working without any difficulty.”

On Monday, Massingue met with the authorities in the provincial capital, Pemba.

Of Cabo Delgado’s seven municipalities one has been severely affected by attacks: Mocímboa da Praia, a town that was occupied by rebels for about a year, until August 2021. The other municipalities – Chiúre, Montepuez, Mueda and Pemba, as well as Balama and Ibo, created in 2022 – have also been turned upside down because they are serving as host communities to internally displaced people.

The minister stressed that agents have been deployed to all municipalities to ensure security during the voter registration drive, which runs from 20 April until 3 June.

“The challenge we have is the logistical conditions, which should be at one hundred percent,” she said. “We have the minimum; we would like to give much more to allow them to be in the workplace without any difficulty.”

The province of Cabo Delgado has suffered an armed insurgency for the last five years, with responsibility for some attacks claimed by a local affiliate of the extremist group Islamic State.

The insurgency has prompted a military response underway since July 2021 with support from Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) that has succeeded in liberating areas near natural gas projects undertaken by foreign multinationals, but new waves of attacks have emerged to the south of the region and also in neighbouring Nampula province.

The conflict has left more than one million people displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and around 4,000 dead, according to the conflict registration project ACLED.

Source: Lusa