Abdul Carimo Issá, a lawyer, former government official and vice-president of the Assembly of the Republic, believes that once the National Electoral Commission (CNE) became politicized, the electoral process in the country became problematic.

Speaking in an interview with RDP Africa about the irregularities in the electoral processes and the current situation in Mozambique, characterized by protests since the CNE announced the election results in October, the former government official believes that "Mozambican electoral law is not good, because it only favours those in power".

"We had to have a more impartial law, and I don't think we can get a law of this nature through Parliament. This law has to come from civil society or perhaps with the support of international organizations. Therefore, the electoral process in Mozambique is vitiated by numerous irregularities," said the lawyer.

According to Abdul Carimo Issá, Mozambique should have matured enough for things to be done with transparency and integrity in order to give prestige not only to the country, but also to the electoral and justice administration bodies.

"Unfortunately, since 1994, what we've seen is an increasing deterioration in electoral processes. A deterioration in the credibility of the processes and the discredit that leads to the fact that today, therefore, most people choose not to vote, because voting or not, it's all the same. So this means that people have become very discredited," Issá lamented.

Abdul Carimo Issá was involved in the first multi-party elections where he and a team had the task of visiting electoral processes in countries with a similar situation to Mozambique, which had just come out of a war. For this reason, he recalls that the first electoral process took place peacefully.

"Later on, the process evolved and became more and more sophisticated. With the tabulation at table level, after a tabulation at district, provincial and national level, computer packages were introduced. All of this meant that fraud could be carried out very frequently," said the lawyer, adding that "the fraudulent process in Mozambique begins at the time of voter registration".

"Either because not every Mozambican citizen is registered, or because the machines that are sent to a particular location don't work, are constantly broken and people can't register. Or because certain documents are not admissible, so all these problems start with the census. And then with the publication of the electoral roll, which is never published, and those that do exist are at the polling stations. So this is the first stage of fraud," he continued.

In addition, the former government official says it doesn't make sense for the CNE to cite a lack of time to analyze the discrepancy in the figures and proceed to announce the election results, leaving the job to the Constitutional Council.

"It's absurd. When a CNE invokes this deadline to do what it did, but forgets that many polling stations didn't open at the time they were scheduled to. So there is no law to comply with?" he questioned, concluding that the current situation in Mozambique is not the problem of the election results, "it's the sum of several other problems affecting Mozambicans, including corruption and poverty".

(Photo DR)