2 October 2008
Maputo — Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, has moved to sack local party leaders in the central province of Sofala who are supporters of the mayor of Beira, Daviz Simango.
Despite Simango's popularity in Beira, Renamo opted not to run him for a second term of office, replacing him as candidate by the Renamo arliamentarian Manuel Pereira. Simango's supporters were outraged, and are now running him as an independent candidate.
According to the Beira daily paper "Diario de Mocambique", the Renamo leadership's latest attempt to reassert control over the party organisation in Sofala was to sack the president of the Sofala branch of the Renamo Youth League, Sande Carmona - who is also the Beira city councillor for Agriculture, Livestock, Gender and fisheries.
The Renamo leadership also purged five other pro-Simango youth league officials - Jose Muchanga (head of mobilization), Natalia Jose (head of information), Nilton Soares (head of finance), Celestinao Maingue (head of the youth league Sofala secretariat), and Jose Francisco (deputy head of culture and sport).
Carmona received a letter from the president of the Renamo youth league sacking him - but, according to Nilton Soares, that letter said the other officials would stay at their posts. It was the Renamo Sofala political delegate, Fernando Mbararano, who decided to sack the other five, and demanded on Sunday that they abandon the Beira youth league offices.
There were scuffles between the pro and anti-Simango factions at the offices on Monday, and on Tuesday Mbararano called in the police to expel the supporters of the mayor.
Soares said that Mbararano wants to throw all Simango's supporters out of Renamo - but he had no intention of leaving. "We support the candidature of Daviz and we shall never hand over our Renamo membership cards. We remain members of Renamo".
Jose Muchanga said that when he arrived at the offices on Tuesday "we were faced with another decision, according to which we had to surrender the keys and leave the office. We tried to resist and Mbararano called the police".
Mbararano told the paper that the expulsion of all six youth league officials was fully justified since, by supporting Simango, they were "defrauding the party".
"We can't let abuses happen inside the party", he said. "These people were removed because they had betrayed Renamo".
He said Carmona and his supporters were responsible for the violence at the youth league offices, which left him with no option but "to seek help from the police so that we could obtain the keys to the offices".
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