According
to the constitution of the Republic
of Mozambique
(article 170, point 2), the parliament (the Assembly of the Republic)
is composed of 250 seats. They are distributed as follows: 248 are allocated to
the 11 internal electoral districts within Mozambique;
and two are allocated to the two external electoral districts (‘Africa’ and the ‘rest of the world’). The rationale
behind the creation of electoral districts outside the national boundaries is
to preserve the voting rights of migrants. The provisions of the 1990
constitution, revised in 2004, allow Mozambican citizens living abroad to vote,
in their countries of residence, not only for their representatives to the
Assembly of the Republic but also in presidential elections. However, the
exercise of their voting rights hinges on the existence of some basic
conditions.
Both the
Voter Registration Law and the General Elections Law emphasize that Mozambican
citizens living abroad have the right to register as electors and vote only if
and when the National Electoral Commission (NEC) considers it possible. (Since
2002, the NEC has been made up of 20 members: 18 are appointed by political
parties represented in the parliament, in proportion to the number of seats
they won at the last election in 1999. Ten are appointed by the ruling party,
the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frente de Libertaçâo de Moçambique, Frelimo)
and eight by the Mozambican National Resistance Resistência Nacional
Moçambicana, Renamo)–Electoral Union coalition. One member is nominated by the
government and the president, the 20th member, is designated by the civil
society organizations. An electoral reform is currently under way and the
composition of the NEC may change in the future.)
Article 9
of Law no. 18/2002 of 10 October 2002, on the institutionalization of
systematic electoral registration for elections and referendums in Mozambique,
states that: (a) registration
will be conducted both within the national territory and abroad; and (b) geographical boundaries and locations for
electoral registration are (i) the national
territory: the districts and Maputo city; and (ii) at diplomatic or consular missions.
The electoral registration referred to in point (ii) will be carried out
only if the NEC considers that the necessary ‘material conditions and control,
review and inspection mechanisms’ are in place in all regions.
Article 10
of the General Elections Law, Law no. 7/2004 of 17 June 2004, states
that ‘Mozambican citizens registered abroad are eligible for the elections
foreseen in the present law’. This is complemented by the provisions of
article 11 (on Mozambican citizens living abroad) of the same law, as
follows.
1. Registered
citizens living abroad cast their vote at the respective diplomatic or consular
mission of the Republic
of Mozambique.
2. Electoral
acts abroad shall take place only after the NEC has verified and confirmed that
the necessary conditions with regard to the material conditions and control,
review and inspection mechanisms are in place in the region(s) constituting the
electoral districts of Mozambican communities abroad.
3. If
the electoral acts referred to in the above point cannot take place, the NEC
shall redistribute the parliamentary seats allocated to the external electoral
districts to the internal electoral constituencies, according to the criteria
determined in the present General Elections Law.
These
provisions were also to be found in the previous electoral laws—the General
Elections Law, no. 4/93 of 28 December 1993, the Voter Registration
Law no. 5/97 of 28 May 1997, the General Elections Law no. 3/99
of 2 February 1999, and the Voter Registration Law no. 9/99 of
14 April 1999. One of the peculiarities of Mozambican electoral practice
since the introduction of the multiparty system is that a new electoral
legislation package (containing the law on electoral registration, the law on
the electoral management bodies (EMBs), and a law on the type of
election—municipal or general elections) has been passed each time the country
has held elections—in 1993 for the 1994 general election, in 1997 for the 1998
municipal elections, in 1999 for the 1999 general election, in 2002 for the
2003 municipal elections, and in 2004 for the 2004 general election. The new
electoral law usually amends and/or complements the provisions of some articles
of the previous law. Once again, an ad hoc parliamentary electoral reform
commission was established in March 2005, upon completion of the 2004 electoral
process, to review and amend the current electoral legislation package in
anticipation of the future electoral processes: the new electoral legislation
package was expected to be passed at the first parliamentary session of 2006.
Thus, for
electors to be registered and elections to be held abroad, the NEC must confirm
that the material conditions and the control, follow-up and monitoring
mechanisms are in place in the external electoral districts. However, the
decision as to whether such conditions are in place could be very subjective
and could become a real bone of contention among the electoral stakeholders. In
fact, even though the external voting issue in Mozambique has been raised
regularly since the preparations for the first democratic multiparty elections
(held in October 1994), following a long period of a one-party system since
independence, and even though it is provided for in the electoral law, external
voting did not take place until the general elections held in December 2004.
The first
attempt to carry out registration in the external electoral districts took
place in 1997 in seven countries—in Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania,
Zambia and Zimbabwe for the Africa electoral district; and in Portugal for the
‘rest of the world’ electoral
district. The preparations failed, and the attempt was a setback: only 1,694
Mozambican citizens in total turned out to register out of an estimated
population of approximately 200,000 expatriate citizens. Considering that the
conditions were therefore not met, the NEC did not repeat the operation in 1999
in preparation for the country’s second general election.
In 2004, in
the course of preparations for the third general election, scheduled for 1 and
2 December, the external voting issue was raised again. A heated debate
took place within the NEC as to whether the EMB should carry out electoral
registration for Mozambican citizens living abroad. Frelimo, the ruling party,
was very supportive of the idea, while almost all the opposition political
parties, led by Renamo, were fiercely against it on the grounds that (a) preconditions (material conditions,
control and inspection mechanisms) had not been met and (b) legal time frame
had already elapsed (arguing that electoral registration should have been
conducted simultaneously in Mozambique and abroad from 28 June to
15 July 2004). In the absence of a consensus, a vote was organized during
the NEC plenary session of 21 July 2004. With eight votes against the idea
and ten in favour, the decision to carry out electoral registration abroad was
officially taken.
With a
separate budget of 400,000 US dollars (USD) totally financed by the government
of Mozambique, the electoral
registration operation took place from 6 to 25 September 2004 in nine
countries—seven in Africa and two in Europe.
Mozambican citizens residing abroad and numbers of registered electors, 2004
The sole
criterion for the selection of the countries where external registration would take
place was demographic—the existence in each country of a minimum of 1,000 legally
registered Mozambican citizens. The figures (taken from the population
estimates) were provided to the NEC by the diplomatic missions in those
countries through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation.
On
11 October 2004, notwithstanding another negative vote from its Renamo-appointed
members, the NEC voted in favour of holding the general election in the two
external electoral districts, thanks to the votes in favour of all its
Frelimo-appointed members. In addition to Renamo, many other opposition
political parties disagreed with the idea of holding the external voting
operation on the grounds that the small number of registered electors
(0.5 per cent of the total registered electorate of 9,142,151) did not
justify the high costs involved and that the mechanisms for proper supervision
and monitoring were not in place. However, it seems that the opposition
political parties’ resistance was most probably linked to the fact that the
external electoral districts are considered to be strongholds of the ruling
party, in addition to the fact that they did not consider the diplomatic and
consular missions where the elections were to take place as politically neutral
premises.
In South Africa
external registration and voting were extended to the areas where migrant
Mozambican citizens are concentrated, namely the mining areas. In the eight
other countries those operations were limited to the premises of Mozambican
diplomatic and consular missions.
No official
budget for the voting operations abroad was disclosed, although part of it was
included in the total budget for the 2004 elections: all the polling materials,
for instance, for both internal and external voting, were produced at the same
time by the same South African company.
The same
voting requirements and procedures that applied in the national territory were
applied for the external voting. The right to vote was exercised in person at
the polling station where the elector was registered. No postal or remote
voting was allowed. The NEC and the Technical Secretariat for Electoral
Administration (STAE), its implementing body, sent supervision teams to the
selected countries. Training programmes for the registration and polling
station staff, as well as voter education campaigns, were designed by the EMBs
at central and national level and run under their close supervision. The
external voting took place over two successive days (1-2 December 2004),
simultaneously with the voting in Mozambique.
For voters
to cast their votes their names had to be included on the electoral register
and the polling station staff had to verify their identity. When the polling
station closed, the presiding officer proceeded immediately with the partial
counting and the results were displayed at the polling station. The presiding
officer immediately informed the diplomatic or consular representation of all
elements of the partial count contained in the results tally sheet. The NEC
supervisory teams present at each diplomatic or consular mission in turn
informed the NEC headquarters in Mozambique. (In the case of
in-country voting, the presiding officer of each polling station immediately
informs the district or city electoral commission of all elements of the
partial count contained in the results tally sheet, and the city or district
electoral commission, in turn, must inform the provincial electoral commission,
which must directly inform the NEC.) The NEC collated and published the results
obtained by each candidate or political party in each electoral district, as
well as the distribution of parliamentary seats won by each party. The official
external voting results were also subject to validation by the Constitutional Council
before being publicly announced together with the in-country results.
The following tables show results of external voting in the 2004 presidential and legislative elections, as validated and announced by the Constitutional Council on 21 January 2005.
Numbers of external votes in the Mozambican presidential election, 2004
Number of external votes in the Mozambican legislative election, 2004
The
insignificant number of registered electors abroad may have been one of the
arguments used by the stakeholders who opposed external voting in 2004, but
their higher turnout (57 per cent in Africa and 64 per cent in the
rest of the world, as compared to 36 per cent in-country) demonstrated
migrants’ willingness to participate in the political debate by electing their
representatives, thus reinforcing the conviction of the stakeholders who had
defended the idea that Mozambican citizens living outside their country should
not be denied the right to vote in national elections.
