6 January 2009
Maputo — Afonso Dhlakama, leader of Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, has threatened that he will disregard the results of the municipal elections held on 19 November.
The elections were won overwhelmingly by the ruling Frelimo Party. Frelimo candidates were elected mayor in 43 of the 45 municipalities. In the city regarded as its stronghold, Beira, Renamo was utterly humiliated when the candidate imposed by Dhlakama, Manuel Pereira, came a poor third, trailing behind the incumbent mayor Daviz Simango (expelled from Renamo in September) and the Frelimo candidate Lourenco Bulha. In the 45th municipality, the northern port of Nacala, no candidate won over 50 per cent and so a second round will be held, probably in mid-February.
Renamo has lost four of the five municipalities it ran prior to the elections, but may just manage to hang on in Nacala.
But Dhlakama, interviewed in the newsheet "Diario Independente" declared that, as far as he was concerned, the elections had never happened. "I, Afonso Dhlakama, and the party I lead, are not going to recognise these elections", he said. "It's as if there had been no elections. Legally and politically, we are not going to recognise them".
Dhlakama is still insisting that Frelimo only won the elections because it fraudulently trucked in vast numbers of voters from outside the municipal areas to cast viotes inside the towns and cities. Nobody else - including the Renamo polling station monitors - saw this huge fleet of trucks, or noticed people who were not on the electoral registers casting votes.
The Renamo complaint about unregistered people voting was lodged a full week after the election. In its ruling on that complaint, on 10 December, the Constitutional Council, the body that has the final word in electoral disputes, dismissed it. The Council pointed out that during the election not a single polling station agent or voter had made such a complaint, and so Renamo had no grounds on which to raise the matter a week later.
Renamo has praised the Constitutional Council when it gives rulings that Renamo likes (as on occasions in early 2008 when the Council has agreed with the Renamo parliamentary group that certain government actions were unconstitutional, and should therefore be reversed).
But on this occasion the Council ruling was not to Renamo's liking and so Dhlakama ignored it. As for his next move, Dhlakama promised that any protests against the election results would be peaceful - but immediately suggested that that they might result in violence "if the police use firearms to prevent them", because "Renamo members are not afraid of death and much less of the riot police".
Dhlakama also wanted to see electoral courts set up at local level to deal with election disputes. That would require a constitutional amendment. When the current constitution, giving the Constitutional Council the power to rule on electoral disputes, was adopted in November 2004, Renamo voted in favour.
Dhlakama said he would explain Renamo's heavy defeat in the municipal elections at three regional conferences to be held in the near future. He expected the southern conference to be held in Gaza province, the conference for the central region in Sofala, and the northern conference in Nampula. At least the first two would be held in mid-January.
Such conferences, he said, were "preparation to reactivate and moralise our grassroots, to explain exactly what happened, because there are some members who say that Renamo is finished and are writing propaganda in the newspapers".
He was particular angered that the right-wing weekly "Zambeze", and its director Fernando Veloso, who have long supported Renamo, have recently taken to denouncing Dhlakama as a liability for the opposition. .
"Veloso says that Dhlakama is finished, Renamo is finished, but how does he know that Renamo is finished where he doesn't even know where Renamo came from?", he fumed. "He ought to say that Frelimo is finished, because it didn't win the elections".
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