The disaster was sparked when heavy rains in neighbouring Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia swelled the Zambezi River which traverses central Mozambique. The Cahora-Bassa dam is releasing an average of 8.4m litres of water per second, while the Kariba dam is discharging at about half that rate. Showers and thunderstorms are forecast for northern Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia during the next week. The tropical cyclone Dera has missed Mozambique and is expected to stay clear of the African mainland in its southward path. In the Zambezi valley the flooding has been much slower than the floods in 2000, but they cover a much wider area with a sparser population, making relief operations more difficult and costly.
Many roads remain impassable.
The start of voting was delayed by more than half an hour as some polling stations waited for deliveries of ballot boxes and voting papers. Overall the capital appeared calm, with armed military police patrolling the almost deserted streets. But this time he is facing a much tougher challenge from a former comrade in the bush war, Kizza Besigye. The bitter campaign has seen each side accusing the other of violence and intimidation, and of trying to rig the vote. When Museveni came to power 15 years ago, he ended a nightmare period in Uganda's history, during which hundreds of thousands of people had been tortured and killed under the brutal dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote.