By Ernesto Nhanale, Lecturer of Journalism
Maputo (MOZ TIMES) – The frequency with which we have witnessed ballot box stuffing with ballot papers marked in advance, voters trying to vote more than once, the swapping of polling station results sheets, the manipulation of laws to favour political actors and even the validation of what is illegal by the Constitutional Council (CC), and the manipulation of public opinion by the publicly owned mass media – all this leads us to believe that fraud should no longer be regarded as a deviation from the norm, subject to social disapproval and which can be punished. Fraud has become a recurrent strategic resource used by certain political parties to win votes.
Since the 1999 elections up until 2024, election fraud has been talked about, and detected, and proof has been shown, but without any effective action being taken to reverse the situation. When we gaze tolerantly on election fraud, this ensures that from one election to the next, fraud takes on ever newer shapes. In the 2023 and 2024 elections, fraud took on alarming and innovative forms. It became normal that in the news items on the days following the vote (outside of those produced by the public sector media) the keynotes should be episodes of fraud and manpulation of election results.
In addition to the habitual types of fraud, during the 2023-2024 election cycle, we witnessed two new ways of adulterating the election results: importing voters and bribes in exchange for election results. The importing of voters has been confirmed by the Zimbabwean paper “The Mirror”, which wrote that Zimbabwean citizens voted in the Mozambican general elections of 9 October. During the voter registration period, this fact had already been denounced. As always, the authorities of the two countries (Mozambique and Zimbabwe) maintained a complicit silence in the face of a fact that should have deserved investigation and public explanation.
As for buying votes, this had never before reached the scale we witnessed in the 2023 municipal elections. In Maputo city, an official for the electoral bodies changed results in exchange for large sums of money. More recently, in Zambezia we witnessed the corrupt purchase of results at the polling stations. An observer from the National Youth Council (CNJ) was violently beaten because he had bribed polling station staff (MMVs) and political party monitors to change results sheets in favour of a particular party.
We could draw up a long narrative about the history of election fraud in Mozambique but this is not very relevant since fraudulent operations inundate our broadcasts, newspapers and social media. They are only not reported by those television stations which want to omit them and thus become part of the brainwashing of public opinon abut electoral transparency in Mozambique. Which is disturbing and leads to the question: how is it that fraud, which is a deviation from the norm, has become the norm that characterises our elections in Mozambique?
The first factor in an answer to this question is the fact that politics in Mozambique has become a space where money is negotiated and, as a result, those who rise to leadership positions have no commitment to the citizens. People want to be in politics to solve their own personal problems, and not those of the people. Many of those who put themselves forward as candidates for public positions want to appropriate the organs of State (Government and Parliament) for their private interests and do little for the country. As a result the citizens’ votes end up losing their meaning and value. When elections are held, the candidates are not very concerned about serving the citizens, but with occupying spaces, in whatever way, to guarantee their private objectives. When these objectives are affected, fraud becomes the immediate resource, in a clear devaluation of the public will expressed through voting.
Due to the inversion of the role of the public service of State institutions, those who are making use of these institutions want, at all costs, to stay there. All the struggles that we have been witnessing are to guarantee that those who are in power keep their positions or expand them. Those in opposition want to keep or extend their benefits. The absence of a sense of politics as serving the citizens means that fraud becomes a normal strategic resource for those who want, at all costs, to be inside State bodies in order to protect their own interests.
The second response explaining the normalisation of election fraud in Mozambique is impunity and the fact that fraud is committed in an institutional way. As we have been witnessing, the election management bodies and the courts have not been at all exemplary in implementing the laws. Sometimes they themselves have been making doubtful interpretations of laws, depending on their interests. We have often witnessed the National Elections Commission (CNE) and the CC taking decisions, not on the basis of laws, but according to the political party interests of the members of these bodies. The interests of electoral justice are disregarded. How often do we read rulings and understand that the venerable judges, instead of consulting legal science, build “politically correct” arguments to protect their positions, and to participate, as accomplices, in the festival that normalises election fraud?
If the election management bodies themselves practice irregularities and use their institutional powers to legitimise them, what can be expected from those who commit fraud at the ballot box and throughout the machinery of electoral administration? What happens to all those people we have seen in videos and photographs published in the press and in social media committing fraud election after election? Absolutely nothing! And when the State, through the institutions of the administration of justice, namely the Attorney-General’s Office and the courts, do nothing to hold anyone responsible for these practices, their agents and leaderships are transmitting the clear message that fraud is normal and sometimes fraud pays. If the law says that something is a crime, but those who practice it are rewarded, what can be expected? Certainly, this phenomenon will prosper!
We have been witnessing, from the highest level, rewards for people who head state bodies, appointed for their loyalty and the possibility of maintaining the system of fraud to benefit corruption. Our history is rich in these rewards. The people whom we see in the public domain being rewarded for fraud are those who, at the next elections, are put in positions of power to ensure the manipulation of election results. The more functions they exercise to guarantee the normalisation of fraud, the more trust they hold, and so they become untouchable. We are facing a corrupted system in which people who live off fraud are afraid of each other.
The third response is make fraud banal – that is, the institutional recognition that fraud is normal. The electoral institutions are structured around the idea of the normalisation of fraud. We saw how the laws were amended over time to accomodate the interests of the political parties in the CNE, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE) and the CC. So when the political parties go into elections, they dismiss the fact that elections are a civic exercise held around their proposals, through independent referees. They want to be players, referees and judges in their own cause. The CC, which judges and decides on election cases, is formed in the interests of political parties, not the interests of electoral justice. We saw how the CC took a decision which clearly contributed to draining the role of the district courts, which are more independent, so that they are reduced to mere handlers of correspondence. The decision taken this year that electoral irregularities are solely (exclusively) judged by the CC, whose judges are appointed by the political parties, removing the role of the district courts from ordering the recounting of votes, is obviously an act to normalise fraud.
Certainly it is not possible to speak of governments committed to the common good when they do deals to normalise fraud. Those who win elections should, if they want to have a voice, govern and return a minimum of dignity to Mozambicans, by taking bold decisions to cut out the evil by the root. But that would be an impossible mission, since it would be necessary to break with a system controlled by the same people who are part of the festival of fraud and who contributed to putting them in power (EN)
