via RENAMO claims victory in elections 30 October 2014
Mozambique’s former rebel movement Renamo has claimed victory in the general elections held on 15 October, alleging that the results released by the provincial elections commissions are “adulterated” and do not reflect what really occurred at the polling stations.
At the end of a Renamo regional conference for the centre and north of the country, held in Beira, most of which took place behind closed doors, Renamo declared that it had won 139 seats in the seven northern and central provinces to just 34 for the ruling Frelimo Party and 14 for the Mozambique Democratic Movement. It added that it would not accept any results which did not agree with its own count.
Even without counting the four southern provincial constituencies, these figures would give Renamo an absolute majority in the 250 strong new parliament.
But Renamo’s numbers are wildly at odds, both with the official results from the provinces, and with the parallel count undertaken by the Electoral Observatory, the largest and most credible group of Mozambican election observers, both of which point to a substantial Frelimo victory, but with the opposition polling much better than it did in the previous elections in 2009.
The Renamo claims to parliamentary seats in detail, province by province, as reported by the independent television station STV, are as follows. The distribution of seats based on the results announced by the provincial commissions is shown below, for comparison,
Niassa: Renamo count: Renamo 9 seats, Frelimo 4, MDM 1
Provincial commission count: Renamo 6, Frelimo 7, MDM 1
Cabo Delgado: Renamo count: Renamo 11, Frelimo 11, MDM 0
Provincial commission count: Renamo 4, Frelimo 17, MDM 1
Nampula: Renamo count: Renamo 36, Frelimo 7, MDM 4
Provincial commission count: Renamo 21, Frelimo 22, MDM 4
Zambezia: Renamo count: Renamo 34, Frelimo 6, MDM 4
Provincial commission count: Renamo 22, Frelimo 18, MDM 5
Tete: Renamo count: Renamo 18, Frelimo 0, MDM 3
Provincial commission count: Renamo 10, Frelimo 11, MDM 1
Sofala: Renamo count: Renamo 18, Frelimo 0, MDM 3
Provincial commission count: Renamo 10, Frelimo 8, MDM 3
Manica: Renamo count: Renamo 13, Frelimo 3, MDM 0
Provincial commission count: Renamo 8, Frelimo 8, MDM 0
These figures show signs of hasty work. The total number of seats allocated in the Renamo count to Zambezia and Tete are respectively 44 and 21 – yet there are 45 seats in Zambezia and 22 in Tete.
The announcement at the end of the conference gave no hint as to how Renamo had arrived at these extraordinary figures.
Renamo has a specific problem with the southern province of Gaza, which has never elected any Renamo candidates to parliament. According to the results released by the Gaza provincial elections commission, this year Renamo again failed to elect anybody in the province, and all 14 seats were won by Frelimo.
The proposal from the Renamo conference was to divide Gaza in half, with seven seats going to Renamo and seven to Frelimo. If that proved unacceptable, then Gaza should simply be excluded from the count, the conference spokesperson declared.
The figures from the 11 provincial commissions show that Frelimo won just over 57 per cent (2.74 million votes), Renamo 33.8 per cent (1.47 million), and the MDM 9.1 per cent (394,000). In the presidential elections, Frelimo candidate Filipe Nyusi won with 57.14 per cent, Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama took 36.38 per cent, and Daviz Simango of the MDM took the remaining 6.48 per cent.
These percentages are corroborated by the Electoral Observatory’s parallel count. From a sample of slightly more than 10 per cent of the polling stations, both urban and rural and from all 11 provinces, the Observatory found that Nyusi won 57.24 per cent, Dhlakama 35.22 per cent and Simango 7.54 per cent.
A parallel count, based on a large enough number of polling stations, covering the entire country, act as a useful check on the accuracy of the official results. In this case, the parallel count suggests that the results announced by the provincial commissions are broadly correct.
The observers from the Electoral Observatory watched the voting and the count at their chosen polling stations, and then received copies of the official results sheets. The parallel count is based on those sheets. Any real count must be based on the polling station results sheets, since there is no other source of information.
If Renamo wishes to be taken seriously, it must explain how its count is so divergent, not only from the official results, but from the parallel count.
The Renamo conference spokesperson claimed that these were the worst elections in Mozambican history, in terms of electoral offences and distortion of data. The suggestion is that the official results derive from an enormous dose of fraud.
Renamo has always alleged that Mozambican elections are characterised by fraud, but these elections are significantly different from all previous ones in that the opposition parties were present at all levels of the electoral apparatus.
The National Elections Commission (CNE) consists of five representatives of Frelimo, four of Renamo, one of the MDM and seven from civil society (and some of the civil society representatives were hand-picked by the political parties). All of the provincial, district and city commissions contain three representatives of Frelimo, two of Renamo, one of the MDM, and nine from civil society. Each of these commissions has two deputy chairpersons, one from Frelimo and one from Renamo.
Even more significant is the political party presence in the CNE’s executive body, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), which organises the elections.
STAE has a professional national director, and two deputies, one from Frelimo and one from Renamo. There are six assistant national directors, three appointed by Frelimo, two by Renamo and one by the MDM, and eighteen other staff members, nine from Frelimo, eight from Renamo, and one from the MDM.
Likewise in the provincial, district and city branches of STAE – there are two assistant directors (one Frelimo, one Renamo), six assistant heads of department (three from Frelimo, two from Renamo and one from the MDM), and six other staff members (again three Frelimo, two Renamo and one MDM).
This politicisation extends to the polling station – each of the parliamentary parties, Frelimo, Renamo and the MDM, had the right to appoint a member of staff at each of the 17,010 polling stations.
If we add all these figures up, it turns out that Renamo had the right to appoint no less than 18,030 people at every level of the electoral machinery, from the polling station right up to the CNE. So if the massive fraud Renamo alleges took place, what were these thousands of Renamo appointees doing? How come they did not notice or stop the alleged frauds? Is Renamo declaring that all the people it appointed were incompetent or treacherous?
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