RENAMO to await court ruling on alleged poll irregularities

Mozambique's main opposition party, RENAMO, will reserve action on its allegations of vote rigging until the country's supreme law-making body makes a ruling on the conduct of the December 2004 parliamentary and presidential elections. "The Constitutional Council is expected to make a ruling either on Friday or Monday", Eduardo Namburete, manager of RENAMO's election campaign, told IRIN. The former rebel movement's national council announced after meeting this week that although it rejected the election results, it would only call for fresh elections in the areas where "irregularities" had been reported, according to Namubrete. Last month the party had called for a re-run of the entire electoral process. Mozambique's ruling FRELIMO party recorded an emphatic victory, bagging nine of the country's 11 provinces in the polls. FRELIMO's presidential candidate, Armando Guebuza, also beat the RENAMO candidate for the top post, Afonso Dhlakama, by garnering 63.7 percent of the vote. The general secretary of the Commonwealth, Don McKinnon, told the state-owned news agency, AIM, that the organisation's secretariat has offered Mozambique technical assistance to improve its electoral procedures. In its report the Commonwealth Observer group was critical of some electoral practices and has asked the authorities to review "the composition and independence" of Mozambique's National Election Commission (CNE). "Since the CNE majority was from FRELIMO, decisions that were put to the vote invariably went FRELIMO's way. In our view, both the structure of CNE and the way it operated in practice meant that independence was lacking," the report noted. The group warned that the composition of the commission "is bound to bring about the very problem from which election management bodies should be free - debate among its members motivated by partisan considerations". The observers recommended that the CNE review the practice of voting over two days. McKinnon was quoted by AIM as saying, "People will be more confident in the results if this time can be cut shorter." The Commonwealth group also asked the authorities to consider the reasons for the relatively low voter turnout and find ways of ensuring the highest possible participation in future polls, which should be held at a more appropriate time that took the weather into account. Among the irregularities the group observed were that some polling stations opened only for one day or less, and some did not open at all; party agents did not have the register of voters' names at any of the polling stations; and in some places there was confusion about the location of the polling stations.