Mozambique: New STAE director-general to be sworn in on Friday

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique: New STAE director-general to be sworn in on Friday

4:48 CAT | 11 Oct 2022

File photo: Domingo

After a long dispute, Mozambique’s National Elections Commission (CNE) announced this Monday that the swear in of Loló Correia as the new director-general of the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE), will take place next Friday in Maputo.

A CNE press release sent to AIM states that the decision to swear in was taken this Monday.

“The National Elections Commission (CNE) meeting today, 10/10/2022, in its 11th Extraordinary Plenary Session, decided to appoint and swear in Mr Loló Correia, for the position of Director-General of the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE), next Friday, 14 October of the current year, in Maputo City,” the statement reads.

Correia should have been sworn in mid-September, but the defeated candidate, Helena Garrine, filed a complaint with the CNE’s legal commission, in which she pointed out irregularities and illegalities during her election process.

The CNE’s legal commission in turn referred the case to the Administrative Court, and was waiting for its ruling.

The selection of the new director-general of STAE, by public tender, did not meet with consensus among the six names presented by the jury, which pushed the process into an internal election.

Correia, who since 2014 was the provincial director of STAE in the western province of Tete, was elected with 10 votes, followed by Helena Garrine, the current national director of training and civic education at STAE, with only seven points.

He was the provincial director of STAE in Tete (centre of the country) and Garrine is currently the national director of Training and Civic Education at the organisation.

He will fill the position vacated by Felisberto Naife last April, after 15 years.

STAE is the executive body of the CNE. The CNE takes the main decisions and STAE, represented in every Mozambican district during electoral periods, must implement them. In particular, STAE must organize the of voter registration and must run all the many thousands of polling stations needed on election day.

The new STAE general director must begin work almost immediately on preparations for the municipal elections scheduled for October 2023. This includes installing provincial elections commissions and provincial branches of STAE, to be followed, within a month, by the establishment of the commissions in those districts that contain municipalities.

Things now look on the bright side with the announcement last Saturday made by CNE saying that it has available three billion meticais (about 47.1 million US dollars at current exchange rate) to cover all the expenses inherent to the electoral process for the current year.

CNE’ s initial estimate is that the municipal elections will cost 9.7 billion meticais (about 151 million US dollars, at the current exchange rate). Of this sum, 3.2 billion meticais will be spent this year on preparations, and the rest in 2023, including the voting itself and the proclamation of results.

Source: AIM