29 October 2008
Maputo — Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, will lose the forthcoming municipal elections because its "populist and demagogic speeches, full of hypocrisy and gross lies, no longer deceive anyone other than itself", declared a senior official of the ruling Frelimo Party on Wednesday.
Speaking in the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, in the "period before the order of the day", a period of up to an hour in which deputies may make speeches not connected to matters on the parliamentary agenda, Edson Macuacua, the Frelimo Central Committee Secretary for Mobilisation and Propaganda, accused Renamo of disastrous mismanagement in the five municipalities where a Renamo mayor was elected in 2003 (Beira, Marromeu, Nacala, Angoche and Mozambique Island),
"Renamo promised that it would do away with municipal fees and taxes, and it broke that promises", he said, "It promised transparent management, and it produced exactly the opposite, fraudulent and ruinous management".
The central city of Beira was an "eloquent example" of mismanagement, he said. Thanks to the split in Renamo in Beira, where the party is divided between supporters and opponents of the current mayor, Daviz Simango, it was now Renamo members "who denounce cases of corruption, theft of resources, irregularities and illegalities committed by their own management in Beira".
The only advances in Beira over the past five years, Macuacua claimed, were due, not to the Renamo city council, but to investments by the central government in such areas as health, education and water supply.
Voters in the five municipalities held by Renamo, he added, felt frustrated by Renamo's failure to make good on its promises and "by five years of institutionalized corruption, harassment, discrimination and stagnation".
Macuacua contrasted the way Frelimo and Renamo have approached the coming elections. Whereas the Frelimo candidates were chosen in inner-party elections using secret ballots, in Renamo the candidates "were imposed by mobile phone text messages, in flagrant opposition to the will of the grass roots".
"Speaking about democracy is one thing, practicing it another", said Macuacua. "While some people just talk about democracy, Frelimo has been practicing it since Frelimo was founded in 1962".
"While Frelimo was created by Mozambicans to serve the interests of Mozambicans, Renamo was set up by the now defunct regimes of Ian Smith and apartheid and by the PIDE (the Portuguese colonial-fascist secret police) with the purpose of destabilizing the country", he declared. "While Frelimo runs in elections with the purpose of serving the people, Renamo stands in elections with the aim of achieving power to help itself, as it did in the five municipalities it controls, looted by its ruinous mismanagement".
"While the President of Frelimo (Armando Guebuza) is in permanent contact with the grass roots, because he draws inspiration from the people, the leader of Renamo (Afonso Dhlakama) is at war with his grass roots, and that why it's said he is afraid to show his face in Beira", added Macuacua.
While Renamo was entirely disorganized, weak and divided, Frelimo, he insisted, "is the only political organisation that inspires confidence in Mozambicans, the only party capable of leading the destinies of the Mozambican people".
Renamo had no answer to this rhetorical tour de force. Instead one of its speakers in the "period before the order of the day", Claudina Guimaraes, claimed that the internationally recognised community-based conservation project "Tchuma Tchato" ("Our Wealth") in the western province of Tete, "only serves the interests of Frelimo".
She did not explain the reasoning behind this, and instead complained that elephants in Tete that raid villagers' fields are not being shot. "The villagers are not allowed to defend themselves against elephants", she claimed.
Guimaraes alleged that the Tete district of Magoe "is still a one party state led by a Marxist-Leninist party", and that Renamo members who refused to join the community police had been "kidnapped".
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