Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi was on Tuesday forecast to be heading for a landslide victory in an election the opposition says has been tarnished by fraud, leaving some voters worried for the future of the country’s fragile peace deal.
Some polling stations recorded many more votes than registered voters in last week’s ballot, the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA) said.
It said that Nyusi will win more than 70 per cent of the vote against 21 per cent for opposition candidate Ossufo Momade, according to data from 2,500 polling stations.
Though official results have yet to be announced and the count is continuing, Momade’s former guerrilla movement turned main opposition party, Renamo, has already rejected the outcome, decrying problems in the process from voter registration through to counting.
Analysts believe that could threaten a historic peace accord signed just months ago between Momade and Nyusi, and in turn the stability of the nation on the verge of becoming a global gas exporter.
EISA programme officer Domingos Rosario told a news conference that at many polling stations in seven provinces, the number of votes greatly exceeded the number of voters.
He said some observers had been prevented from carrying out their work.
A spokesman for the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat did not respond to multiple requests for comment on fraud accusations nor the pace of the official count.
Two-thirds of polling stations have been processed, representing just over 36 per cent of the more than 13 million potential ballots from registered voters, according to data on the electoral commission’s website.
So far, Nyusi has taken 74.6 per cent of the presidential vote versus 20.2 per cent for Momade.
Alice Nandja, 23, a law student, said definitive results should have been announced by now, and the numbers so far were hard to explain.
“We will have to agree with Renamo,” she said. “I don’t think people are stupid enough to vote for Frelimo that much.
“The election should serve to legitimise the peace agreement, but it seems to have created more division within the Mozambican people,” she added.
Renamo and Nyusi’s party, the ruling Frelimo, fought on opposite sides of a 16-year civil war that ended in a truce in 1992, but the former foes have clashed sporadically since. -Reuters
