CNE announces municipal election results – AIM report

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CNE announces municipal election results – AIM report

7:14 CAT | 24 Oct 2018

Screen grab: Facebook

Mozambique’s National Elections Commission (CNE) on Wednesday announced the results of the elections held in the country’s 53 municipalities on 10 October, giving victory to the ruling Frelimo Party in 44 cities and towns.

The main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, is the dominant force in eight municipalities, while the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) retained control of its stronghold in the central port city of Beira.

But these figures do not give the whole picture. For, thanks to its boycott of the 2013 municipal elections, Renamo controlled no municipalities at all at the start of this year. Now its eight confirmed wins include three major cities – Nampula, Quelimane and Nacala. It has also made inroads into what were previously regarded as Frelimo strongholds in the far north, taking Chiure in Cabo Delgado province and Cuamba in Niassa.

In terms of votes cast, Frelimo won 51.95 per cent – which is its worst result in any election. Renamo took 38.71 per cent of the votes, the MDM 8.5 per cent, and assorted minor parties 0.84 per cent.

The MDM lost heavily. In 2013, when it was the sole opposition to Frelimo, it controlled four municipalities, and had a strong presence in many of the municipal assemblies. Now it is down to just one city, and its presence in the assemblies has been decimated.

In most of the municipalities, the results were not contested. But Renamo has claimed serious fraud took place in five, and there is certainly evidence of massive irregularities in four small towns. Despite this the CNE, apart from correcting mistakes in arithmetic, it did not change the results it received from the “intermediate count” done by the district and city elections commissions.

The minutes of the CNE meeting that approved the results admits that in the mining town of Moatize the warehouse containing the electoral materials was broken into, in order to do a recount which Renamo denounced as illegal.

The local branch of the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), the executive wing of the CNE, authorised the break in. This runs completely counter to the normal rule on STAE warehouses, which is that they have four padlocks with the keys held by STAE, Frelimo, Renamo and the MDM. It needs the cooperation of all three parties to open the padlocks.

In the initial count in Moatize, Renamo won with 11,169 votes to 9,856 for Frelimo. There was an independent check on this count. Journalist Aparicio Jose de Nascimento, editor of the weekly paper “Malacha”, published in Moatize, collected all the information from the results sheets of the 49 Moatize polling stations and published it.

The Moatize polling station results, as given by “Malacha” showed Renamo winning 11,166 votes to 9.789 for Frelimo – almost exactly the same as in the first district count.

But Frelimo demanded a recount. This was done without the presence of monitors from the opposition parties, and after the break in at the STAE warehouse. It gave Frelimo 9,837 votes and Renamo 9,739.

As for Alto Molocue, in Zambezia province, the CNE accepted that some polling station results sheets had “disappeared” and had then somehow been recovered and added to the total. Nonetheless, it accepted the district intermediate count, giving Frelimo a victory of less than one per cent.

In this case, there happens to be a complete parallel count done by observers from EISA (Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa) which gave Renamo over 50 per cent of the vote.

Renamo also claimed that in Monapo, in Nampula province, results from two polling stations had been illicitly altered, and that its election agent in the town was not invited to the intermediate count.

In Marromeu municipality on the south bank of the Zambezi, Renamo says that results sheets from ten polling stations were not given to the opposition monitors, and were not signed by the polling station staff members. Yet they were added to the 29 results sheets which were uncontested. This turned a Renamo victory into a Frelimo one.

The CNE minutes report that the commission divided on whether it was competent to decide the matter, given that it had already been heard by the Marromeu district court (which turned down the Renamo appeal) and was now being appealed to the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law.

In the end it published the intermediate count from Marromeu, but added that it was sending all the relevant court documents from all the contested municipalities to the Constitutional Council.

The fifth municipality where Renamo claims fraud occurred is Matola, the second largest city in the country. The problem here is that three final results sheets have appeared, all apparently signed by the chairperson of the Matola City Elections Committee, Carlos Come. Two of these sheets must be fakes.

The CNE accepted the last one to appear, read out by Come when announcing the Matola intermediate account on 13 October. The other two are certainly highly suspicious in that they are virtually identical, except for exactly 4,000 votes transferred either from the MDM to Frelimo, or from Frelimo to the MDM. Those 4,000 votes are enough to make the difference between a Frelimo and a Renamo victory.

At least one of them, and possibly both, are competent forgeries. But only an independent count of all 706 Matola polling station results sheets can lay the matter to rest. To date, neither Renamo nor STAE has taken the simple measure of putting the results sheets on a website so that the public can make its own calculations.

The CNE, at a meeting which lasted most of Monday and into the small hours of Tuesday morning, approved the results by eight votes to five with three abstentions. One of the 17 CNE members was not present at the vote.

The dispute over the five municipalities where fraud is alleged now goes before the Constitutional Council. Renamo election agent Andre Magibire told reporters he is convinced that the Council will find for Renamo.

Source: AIM