General Elections 82 – 18 October 2019
This election was different. Frelimo always calls on its members to win “at all costs”, but having reported on all of Mozambique’s multiparty elections, this one feels the first general election in which Frelimo exerted power in an organised but decentralised way.
Reports from observers and correspondents at polling station level showed a new mood of petty control. Polling station presidents insisted that observers must stand or could not stay in the polling station for more than 30 minutes, or refused to admit them for claimed irregularities. This came on top of the refusal at district and provincial level to issue thousands of credentials to independent observers and party delegates (poll watchers), while issuing thousands of credentials to previously unknown Frelimo groups such as the CNJ (National Youth Council) and SIM – in some cases without even names of the observers on the credential. Many of these “observers” appeared to be local Frelimo officials, and correspondents reported incidents when these “observers” were giving instructions to polling station staff.
Observers or party delegates who raised questions were sometimes challenged by polling station staff, a Frelimo delegate, or a Frelimo-linked observer; sometimes this expanded into a challenge by several people who appeared to know each other. Police were called or the polling station president threatened to call the police, as we report in the news below. For the observer, this was clearly intimidating – although there were rarely direct threats. Many individual observers or opposition party delegates felt too intimidated to comment or criticise. This climate of coordination, control and intimidation was reported by observers and correspondents in many places, and this was new in this election.
This climate of control and intimidation created space for small scale misconduct on a greater level than reported in the past. Known Frelimo voters were not being required to put their fingers in the indelible ink or only inking the fingertip. More cases of people with extra ballot papers have been noted – people actually caught, or several ballots folded together found in the ballot box during the count. Observers reported a widespread disregard for the rules during the count. Results sheets (editais) were not posted outside the polling stations as required by law. Staff were seen writing editais outside the polling station and even in the back of trucks carrying them to district headquarters. Observers commented on how common it was that bags of ballot papers were not sealed.
Mozambique’s electoral operations are now totally politicised. At the demand of Renamo over the past decade, there are party representatives on all elections commissions and in all STAEs, because Renamo believed that more people watching would prevent fraud. But it has had the opposite effect. Party seats are granted in proportion to the number of seats in parliament, and civil society seats on elections commissions are, in practice, granted to people from party aligned civil society groups in the same proportion. This gives Frelimo a majority on all elections commissions. In past elections, the National Elections Commission (CNE) tried to be balanced and relatively neutral, but in municipal elections last year and national elections this year the CNE voted along party lines. This passed down the hierarchy, so provincial and district commissions and STAEs were Frelimo dominated, and they used their power to refuse credentials to independent observers and to place party people on polling station staffs.
Two events consolidated this sense of control and intimidation. In Gaza the election commission registered more than 300,000 more voters than there are voting age adults, according to the 2017 population census. When the head of the National Statistics Institute refused to bend the census to match the registration, he was forced to resign by President Filipe Nyusi. It was a clear message of Frelimo control. Then 8 days before the vote, a police death squad gunned down the head of independent civil society observation in Gaza on a Xai-Xai street in broad daylight. It was a clear message of intimidation of independent observation.
Frelimo has always been highly decentralised. The message from the top is simply “we must win at all costs” and it is left to local people to decide what to do and how to do it. And as local elections showed, this is interpreted differently in each place. But the difference this time was an apparent second message from the top urging better organisation at local level and actually demonstrating that Frelimo was in control of the elections.
Frelimo is winning by a large margin, and decentralised decision-making and action makes it very difficult to assess how important is the misconduct. But the European Union yesterday correctly noted the “unlevel playing field” and the “climate of fear”. The new show of control and intimidation undoubtedly played an important role in the landslide.
Joseph Hanlon
