Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
2 July 2009
Maputo — A sixth parliamentary deputy has publicly resigned from Mozambique's main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo.
He is Abel Vicente Sana Sana, who was head of the Renamo list for the northernmost province of Niassa in the December 2004 parliamentary elections. With Sana Sana's defection, two of the three Renamo deputies from Niassa have now left the party (the first was the former head of the Renamo parliamentary group, Maria Moreno).
In his resignation letter, sent to Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama, and cited in the latest issue of the weekly paper "Zambeze", Sana Sana said he "no longer has enough morale to remain a member of the party".
Sana Sana joined Renamo in 1992, the year of the peace agreement between Renamo and the Mozambican government. He was Renamo delegate in the district of Lichinga-Chimbonila from 1993 to 1995, and then Niassa provincial delegate between 1996 and 2005.
Sana Sana's political future is unclear - but the deputy who defected in late June, Cornelio Quivela, has now firmly embraced the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), led by the mayor of Beira, Daviz Simango, who was himself expelled from Renamo in September last year.
In an interview with "Zambeze", Quivela urged Renamo members to join the MDM. But he also called for the MDM and Renamo to join forces and run as a coalition in the presidential, parliamentary and provincial elections scheduled for 28 October. He proposed that the hypothetical MDM-Renamo coalition should run Simango as its presidential candidate, while Dhlakama should be content with a position in parliament.
Quivela recalled that when the Renamo National Council discussed expelling Simango, in September 2008, "mine was the only voice proposing that the question of Beira be treated very prudently, to stop the party from destroying itself".
From that moment "the leadership lost confidence in me", he continued. Events, Quivela believed, proved him right because "the decision to expel Daviz Simango precipitated the destruction of Renamo. The party is deeply divided precisely because Simango's situation was not treated with due care".
"Unfortunately, Renamo is currently on fire, and with little change of renewing itself and facing the coming general elections", he added.
Today, Renamo intellectuals are disillusioned, Quivela said, "and the whole advisory machinery that surrounded the President (Dhlakama) has been deactivated. Renamo's shadow government is completely dead. For a long time, the party's Political Commission has not functioned".
It looked as if Dhlakama himself had resigned, "since it's been a long time since he's visited his own office or has met with party bodies", he said. Renamo members had heard that Dhlakama had left Maputo and gone to live in the northern province of Nampula, but such a decision needed authorisation by a party body, and a change in its statutes "since officially Renamo has its headquarters in Maputo".
"When the interests of the party are at stake, it is necessary to change the leader", Qjuivela warned. It would be "a fatal disgrace" for Dhlakama to contest the presidential election "and win less than 15 per cent of the votes".
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