10 November 2008
Maputo — Otilia Benedito, a Radio Mozambique journalist covering the local election campaign in the western city of Tete, suffered injuries on Thursday when youth wearing T-shirts of the ruling Frelimo Party threw stones at her, reports Monday's issue of the independent daily "O Pais".
At the time of the attack, Benedito was covering the campaign of Celestino Bento, the candidate of the former rebel movement Renamo for the post of mayor of Tete. She doubted that she was the intended target for the youths, but had contacted Frelimo officials in the city to protest at the behaviour of the party's supporters.
She said that the party had told her "we shall investigate the case, but we don't assume that the people who threw stones at you are Frelimo members, since some of our campaign material might have been stolen, ending up in the hands of people of bad faith, who used it to damage Frelimo's good name".
The head of the Radio Mozambique delegation in Tete, Teixeira Cunheira, said "it was lucky that the attack did not seriously injure our journalist and she is continuing to work".
In Ulongue town, in Tete province, the police arrested three members of Renamo on Friday for destroying Frelimo posters. There are now seven people under arrest in the province for election campaign offences.
The Renamo candidate for mayor of Ulongue, Mario Franque, denied that Renamo members had been destroying Frelimo campaign material. He claimed that in reality it was Renamo posters that were being massively vandalized in the town.
Meanwhile in the southern city of Inhambane, Renamo had a very different problem with its posters. Somehow they had been printed with slogans urging people to vote, not for Renamo, but for the Renamo-Electoral Union coalition - which no longer exists, outside of the national parliament.
A reporter from the Beira daily "Diario de Mozambique" who called on the Renamo delegation in Inhambane found Renamo members using white paint to eliminate the reference to the "Electoral Union" from the posters. The same mistake had affected the Renamo propaganda in the other municipalities in Inhambane province (Maxixe, Vilanculo and Massinga).
Posters for a coalition that is not running might be classified as "deceitful electoral propaganda", which is illegal. No-one in the Inhambane office was able to tell the journalist how the embarrassing mistake had occurred. In Massinga, the Renamo candidate for mayor, Alberto Samuel, blamed the mistake on the party's Maputo head office.
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