12 December 2007
Maputo — Afonso Dhlakama, leader of Mozambique's former rebel movement Renamo, is losing patience with those Renamo parliamentary deputies who fail to turn up for debates and votes in the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.
At a meeting with Renamo deputies in a Maputo hotel, Dhlakama warned "I am going to be very tough on those who fail to attend parliamentary sessions".
According to a report in the daily paper "Diario de Mocambique", he said that one measure he might take would be to invite such deputies to resign their seats.
"On television I often see many empty seats (on the Renamo benches)", said Dhlakama. "I know that there are deputies who arrive late, and then abandon the session".
There are 90 deputies in the Renamo parliamentary group, and Dhlakama said that attendance sometimes drops to as low as 40 in the weekly meeting of the group.
The physical presence of deputies in the parliamentary chamber is clearest during votes - and these prove Dhlakama's point, since usually a higher percentage of the ruling Frelimo Party's 160 deputies are present than of Renamo's 90.
Deputies who wish to absent themselves for any reason can request the "temporary suspension of their mandate", and the list system used in Mozambican parliamentary constituencies means that they are replaced for their period of absence by the next person on the list.
Frelimo deputies use this procedure very frequently, and Renamo ones very rarely. In principle, a deputy who does not show up to a session will lose that day's wages - but there is nothing to stop a deputy clocking in at the start of the session and then disappearing for the rest of the day.
But Dhlakama has no power to sack deputies, as he found in the previous parliament when five deputies who had left or been expelled from Renamo held onto their seats despite all attempts by the Renamo leadership to have them removed.
The conditions under which deputies lose their seats are laid down in parliamentary rules, and it is not enough to be absent for a few days. A deputy would have to be absent without good reason for 30 days before losing his seat and, given the size of parliamentary salaries, no Renamo deputy will be careless enough to run up that number of absences.
Dhlakama was also worried about his party's derisory showing in Mozambique's southern provinces. In Maputo city, only two of the 16 parliamentary seats are held by Renamo. Dhlakama said he wanted to use the 90 Renamo parliamentarians to mobilise support for the party while they are in the capital - and to do so on explicitly ethnic lines.
"All the ethnic groups in the country live in Maputo", he said. "The Renamo deputies also represent these ethnic groups". Thus each of the Renamo deputies should go to people of his own ethnic group, and ask them "brother, rather than voting for the others, vote for me".
Gaza province, the most solidly pro-Frelimo province in the country, is another headache for Dhlakama. In three parliamentary elections (1994, 1999 and 2004), Renamo has never won a seat in Gaza. "We have thousands and thousands of members in Gaza, yet we have never managed to elect a single deputy", he lamented.
But he was confident that all electorates change, and are never eternally loyal to the same party. Hence "Frelimo can lose its seats in Gaza".
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