Tete — Mozambique's main opposition party, Renamo, claimed in the western city of Tete on Thursday, that over 200 members of other parties have defected to it in recent days.

The Tete city Renamo political delegate, Manuel Pereira, showed reporters 197 applications for membership of the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM). These forms, bearing photographs of the applicants, and the MDM stamp are supposedly from Renamo members who went over to the MDM and have subsequently changed their minds.

Pereira referred to these people as "lost sheep" who had returned to the Renamo fold. He said winning them back to Renamo demonstrated the "excellent performance" of Renamo in the city and the high degree of mobilization of its members.

Pereira also presented 26 membership cards of the ruling Frelimo Party. This comes on top of 30 Frelimo membership cards that Renamo displayed while canvassing in a Tete market on Saturday. Supposedly these cards belonged to disillusioned Frelimo members who have defected to Renamo.

But none of the owners of either the MDM forms or the Frelimo cards showed their faces. These were documents without people.

This is in sharp contrast to the practice of Frelimo and the MDM. When these parties collect defectors from their rivals they show them in public, rather than simply displaying bits of paper.

There is no way of telling whether the cards shown by Pereira are authentic, since he did not allow reporters to see the names of their owners or the dates on which they were issued. Pereira claimed that he could not reveal the names of the alleged Frelimo defectors, for fear that they might then lose their jobs in the state apparatus.