Maputo — The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on Thursday ratified the nominations by President Armando Guebuza of new heads for the Supreme Court, the Administrative Tribunal (the body that oversees public expenditure), and the Constitutional Council (the highest body in matters of constitutional law, which also validates elections results).

The new president of the Supreme Court, Ozias Pondja, has been a member of the court since 2002. His judicial career spans three decades: he was chief attorney in Zambezia province in the late 1970s, and was then presiding judge in provincial courts, first in Cabo Delgado, then in Zambezia.

He replaces Mario Mangaze, whose five year term of office has expired. Mangaze served four terms of office, for a total of twenty years at the head of the Supreme Court.

Machatine Munguambe was ratified as head of the Administrative Tribunal. He was previously the Vice-Chancellor of the Mozambican police academy, ACIPOL, and was once director of the law faculty at Maputo's Eduardo Mondlane University. His predecessor, Antonio Pale, had served for 15 years (three terms of office).

The new head of the Constitutional Council, Luis Mondlane, has been a Supreme Court judge for 20 years. He was also the first presiding judge of the SADC (Southern African Development Community) Tribunal, whose most important ruling struck down as illegal parts of the chaotic "fast track" land reform under which the Zimbabwean regime of President Robert Mugabe had seized land from white commercial farmers.

The term of office of his predecessor, the 76 year old Rui Baltazar, had also expired.

The opposition Renamo-Electoral Union coalition tried to block the ratification of Mondlane and Pondja, on patently spurious grounds. The most experienced of the coalition's jurists, Maximo Dias, distanced himself from this hostility, and was the only opposition member of the Assembly's Legal Affairs Commission who supported the two judges.

One of the Renamo charges against Mondlane was patently untrue. They blamed him for the delay in reaching justice for the families of the 205 people killed in Mozambique's worst rail disaster, at Tenga, about 30 kilometres north-west of Maputo, on 25 May 2002. When the case came to trial, an outrageous judgment at the Maputo Provincial Court acquitted all the rail workers involved of manslaughter through negligence.

The prosecution appealed, and two Supreme Court judges, including Mondlane, found in favour of the prosecution on 29 November 2005. Renamo claimed that Mondlane sat on the ruling for three years before forwarding it to the Maputo Provincial Court. However, the Supreme Court records show that the case was sent back to the Maputo court on 21 December 2005.

In this, and its other complaints against Mondlane and Pondja, Renamo simply plagiarised the right wing weekly "Zambeze" which has been running a libelous campaign against Supreme Court judges for the past couple of months.

Renamo cited two other cases, involving Pondja and Mondlane, where it did not like the outcome. In an appeal of 2002, involving alleged theft from the National Social Security Institute (INSS), the two judges ordered the original verdict quashed, on the grounds that there was no proof that the crime had been committed. Renamo deputies claimed that this was an example of "impunity", as though government officials, when charged with crimes, are automatically guilty.

The other case involved Pondja and Mondlane reducing the compensation to be paid to the state by a drug trafficker. The Maputo City Court had ordered Samssuduine Satar, the only man ever tried in connection with the seizure of 40 tonnes of hashish in 1995, to pay the full cost of the destruction of the drug. The Supreme Court clearly regarded this as unreasonable, since Satar was only the driver, and cut the amount to be paid.

Of all the dozens of cases heard by the two judges these were the only ones Renamo cited. They claimed them as proof that Pondja and Mondlane are "malleable", an insulting term to use against two of the country's most experienced judges.

Renamo used court cases as its arguments in the legal affairs commission, but in the debate on the floor of the Assembly, it switched to tribalism. The problems with the appointments ,Renamo deputies repeatedly claimed, was that all three judges were born in the south of the country.

Antonio Muchanga claimed "the country has many capable cadres and President Guebuza did not choose them because they're not from his ethnic group".

Luis Boavida went much further and cited government appointments as "proof" that Guebuza favoured southerners. He cited the appointments of half a dozen southerners, and just ignored any government member from elsewhere in the country (such as the Prime Minister, who is from the central province of Tete, or the Defence Minister who comes from the northern province of Cabo Delgado).

"Why don't you look at all the ministries", retorted Frelimo deputy Amelia Sumbana. "We won't get anywhere in this tribalist fashion".

Alfredo Gamito pointed out that Frelimo was founded, in 1962 as a movement of national unity, while Renamo habitually lapsed into tribalism and regionalism. Boavida, in an inventive take on Mozambican history, claimed that all "the real Frelimo leaders" were arrested and killed "by the southerners". This would have come as news to the man who fired the first shots in Frelimo's war of independence, Alberto Chipande, from Cabo Delgado, who was sitting on the Frelimo benches listening to this bile.

"You've taken your history from your paymasters (i.e. the now defunct Rhodesian and South African racist regimes)", Gamito told Boavida.

When the secret ballot vote was taken 148 of the 209 deputies present voted for the ratification of Pondja and Mondlane, and 151 voted for Munguambe. Since there were only 145 Frelimo deputies in the room, three Renamo deputies must have defied the leadership of their parliamentary group.