Fewer than 10 people have died and 50 injured in pre-election violence in Mozambique, according to an election official who said on Thursday that the toll showed a ”more peaceful” climate than in previous elections.
”There have been minor cases of violence [but] the campaigning has been more peaceful than in the 1994 and in 1999 elections,” Filipe Mandlate, a spokesperson for the National Election Commission, told reporters in Maputo.
”I am compiling the figures … the number of dead is less than 10 and injured less than 50,” he said.
Voters in Mozambique will go to the polls on December 1 and 2 to choose a successor to President Joaquim Chissano, who is stepping down after 18 years in power.
Chissano’s successor, wealthy businessman Armando Guebuza of the ruling Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), is locked in a close race with the main opposition leader Afonso Dhlakama.
Dhlakama’s Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) has been crying foul ahead of the elections, accusing the ruling party of planning widespread fraud to win.
The elections are the third in Mozambique since its 1975 independence from Portugal, a year after which it plunged into a brutal civil war which ended only1 6 years later, in 1992.
A row with the EU, which has sent 125 observers, is threatening to cast a pall over the elections. Mozambican election officials have turned down requests from EU observers for full access to a centre where votes are to be tallied.
The observers would be allowed to ”accompany the transportation of votes from the stations to the local and then provincial tabulation centre, but they can monitor the national tabulation process on a computer screen and not inside the room where counting is going on,” said Mandlate.
About eight million voters are eligible to cast ballots at around 13 000 polling booths set up throughout the southern African country. – Sapa-AFP