“The Constitutional Council concludes that electoral legislation has created formal mechanisms to ensure the transparency of electoral processes, opting for the partyization of the organs which supervise the electoral process, from top to bottom,” says Acórdão 25. It stresses that “the declared objective of the legislators in party-izing the CNE, its supporting bodies, STAE and polling stations has been achieved.”
Members of the CNE (Commissão Nacional de Eleições, National Elections Commission) and district and provincial elections commissions are named in proportion to party representation in parliament. Parties nominate deputy directors and technicians to the Election Technical Secretariat (STAE, Secretariado Técnico da Administração Eleitoral) at all levels. Each of the three parties in parliament names one member of each polling station staff. And all parties have party poll watchers (delegates) in each polling station.
Some election commission members are named by civil society organizations (CSOs), but instead of being neutral, they were selected from party aligned CSOs in the same proportion as party nominees. The gave the party of government, Frelimo, a majority on all electoral commissions.
The system was promoted by Renamo and particularly the late President Afonso Dhlakama, who took the view that Mozambique was so polarised that no one could be neutral, and therefore the best choice was to stuff the electoral system with Renamo supporters to keep watch. But it has proved counterproductive, for two reasons.
First, Renamo could never find and train enough people to effectively participate and maintain a check on the system, which became particularly clear in 2018 and 2019. Second, it promoted the idea that everyone in the electoral system was there to benefit their party.
This second point is part of a much larger issue – the inheritance from the one-party state and from colonialism before that. In the 1975-90 period of a single party, there was no question of a “neutral” civil service. Instead, the civil service was there to promote the interests of the ruling party, much as the previous civil service was expected to support the fascist Portuguese state, and civil servants were expected to be in Frelimo. With the arrival of the multi-party system many in the civil service, including police and STAE, still saw their role as to support the elected government of Frelimo. Senior officials initially all came from the one-party era and a Frelimo government controlled promotions.
Initially, Renamo did not want to change the system because it wanted that power when it was eventually elected. Party-ization of higher courts, the electoral system, and other bodies was accepted as a compromise. In the few years before his death, Dhlakama came to understand the problem and pushed unsuccessfully for a more neutral civil service. But the 2018 and 2019 elections saw the civil service – STAE, police, courts, education – pushed to be much more partisan. Faced with more blatant misconduct including intimidation and arrests, Renamo was unable to mount an effective challenge.
In 2012 Sheik Abdul Carimo, a key figure in the joint CSO Electoral Observatory, gave an interview to Canal de Moçambique is which he argued that “STAE and CNE are neither independent nor impartial.” A year later he was named President of the CNE and initially tried to create some sense of neutrality and consensus.
But by the 2018 municipal elections this had failed completely, and votes in at least four municipalities were manipulated to prevent opposition victories. Opposition members of electoral commissions and STAE were simply bypassed and ignored, and were too weak and poorly trained to object effectively. In several municipalities, police were overtly supportive of Frelimo. Court challenges proved difficult because the Constitutional Council is similarly appointed on a party basis and judges and magistrates named by the government in power. The Ministry of Education and schools increasingly became a channel for party mobilisation.
Party-ization and misconduct in 2018 went unchallenged by the courts and the international community, so Frelimo felt safe to mobilize significant parts of the electoral administration for the 2019 general elections. Public statements never specifically called for misconduct, but often stressed that it was essential to win “at all costs”.
Decades in power has created a decentralized party structure in which senior party members take decisions locally because they feel they know what is expected of them.
Frelimo’s electoral machine did, however, target two provinces, as we note below: Gaza to inflate the pro-Frelimo vote, and Zambézia to prevent the election of a dynamic Renamo governor.
Frelimo has created a “party machine” similar to US cities (1890s-1960s), Latin America, and Italy and Japan (1950s-1990s), based in part on political clientelism in which jobs, contracts and licences are dependent on support for a predominant party.
Party-ization was supported by both sides in parliament, but it has allow the Frelimo machine to dominate the electoral administration. Many of the problems discussed below, from Gaza overregistration to denial of observer credentials to misconduct in the counting occurred because Frelimo was able to use party-ization and the opposition was not.
