17 November 2008
Maputo — A former parliamentary deputy for the opposition Renamo-Electoral Union coalition on Sunday announced that he has defected and joined the ruling Frelimo Party.
The former deputy is Sergio Sefane, who served in the Mozambican parliament from 1999 to 2004. His defection to the ruling party was announced at the closing rally held by Arao Nhancale, the Frelimo candidate for mayor of the southern Mozambican city of Matola.
Sefane had been a member of the Independent Alliance of Mozambique (ALIMO), one of the minor parties allied to Renamo in the coalition. He was secretary of the board of the general meeting of the coalition (although in reality the coalition has not held a general meeting for years). Sefane told the rally he had decided to join Frelimo because the opposition "has no national political agenda".
"One of the virtues of a leader is knowing how to listen to other people", Sefane said in an interview with AIM. "But the leaders of the opposition in Mozambique, including the leader of Renamo (Afonso Dhlakama), don't have this culture".
The opposition, he continued, did not know how to weave together ideas for the development of the country. "I don't believe there is nobody in the opposition who has good ideas", he said, "but the leadership doesn't know how to pull those ideas together. They don't know how to build a political agenda out of those ideas for the development of the country".
After the head of the Frelimo central brigade in Maputo province, Veronica Macamo, presented him to the rally, Sefane declared that he would not advise anyone to join the current opposition parties.
"I thank you for letting me into this great house called Frelimo", he said. "Pardon me for having got lost".
On Friday, another senior opposition figure, Raimundo Samuge, who had once been a political advisor to Dhlakama, announced in the central city of Quelimane that he had joined Frelimo, and declared "this is the best decision I've made in the past 16 years".
This was not a major surprise, since Samuge had announced his resignation from Renamo on 1 August, when he told reporters he had sent his membership card back to the Renamo leadership.
Samuge was once a very senior figure in Renamo. He was the national director of the party's mobilization department in 2002, and was the Renamo deputy chairperson of the National Elections Commission (CNE) that organised the 2004 presidential and parliamentary elections.
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