6 November 2009
Maputo — A group of tiny Mozambican extra-parliamentary political parties announced in Maputo on Friday that they are forming a new coalition to work for "democratic change".
The group is called G-12, and its spokesperson, Francisco Campira of PASOMO (Social Broadening Party), claimed that 12 parties were members. When AIM pointed out that its founding document only listed 10 parties, he said the name was chosen for "historic reasons".
A closer look at the document shows that there were once 12 names but the last two have been removed by tippex. The alteration was incompetently done, and the names of the other two parties can still be read - they are UNAMO (Mozambique National Union) and PRD (Democratic Renewal Party).
It is not too hard to guess why they want nothing to do with Campira and his band of minnows. The UNAMO and PRD leaders, Carlos Reis and Manecas Daniel, have taken their limited forces into a much more promising vehicle - the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) led by the Mayor of Beira, Daviz Simango. Reis and Daniel were both chosen as MDM candidates for last week's general election.
The other nine organisations in the G-12 are: PAREDE (National Reconciliation Party), CDU (United Congress of Democrats), PACODE (Democratic Congress Party), UDF (United Democratic Front), PARTONAMO (Party of all Mozambican Nationalists), PNDM (Mozambican National Democratic Party), PLDM (Free and Democratic Party of Mozambique), PSDM (Social Democratic Party of Mozambique) and PEMO (Ecologist Party - not to be confused with the other Mozambican Ecologist Party, which goes by the acronym PEC-MT).
Some of these miniscule groups have tried their hand at electoral politics in the past and done very badly indeed. Thus in the 1994 parliamentary election, PASOMO won 0.5 per cent of the vote, PAREDE won 0.3 per cent, and the CDU won just 0.04 per cent.
The group is furious that this time the National Elections Commission (CNE) excluded them from the elections, ruling that they simply had not presented the legally required documentation for their candidates.
Campira dismissed CNE chairperson Joao Leopoldo da Costa as "politically sick". He claimed that the G-12 "is the expression of the revolt and rejection of the Mozambican people against the obscure, tendentious and partisan way the CNE has handled the elections".
The new coalition "expresses the dignity of the Mozambican people and is the concrete proof that not all the opposition parties sold themselves to the regime on the eve of the elections in order to obtain a few crumbs to satisfy their hunger".
He was referring to such groups as the Labour Party (PT) and the Independent Party of Mozambique (PIMO), which called on their supporters to vote for the re-election of President Armando Guebuza, candidate of the ruling Frelimo Party.
He claimed the elections "were seriously manipulated from the start through fraudulent games by the CNE, which removed all credibility from the process and legitimacy from the winners".
Campira said that the Mozambican people had been denied "a true choice", and the numbers of votes announced in the media "are largely the work of the electoral bodies and do not reflect the genuine will of the Mozambican people".
When AIM asked if he was really suggesting that Frelimo and Guebuza had not won the elections, Campira failed to give a straight answer. The current estimate is that Guebuza has won around 75 per cent of the votes and is more than two million votes ahead of Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the main opposition party, Renamo.
Campira claimed that the minor parties campaigned for Daviz Simango during the election. But no journalist reported any action by a minor party in support of Simango and the MDM.
Asked why the CNE should pay any attention to parties which have few members, few votes, no publications, no websites, and no offices, Campira claimed "what is small today can be big tomorrow".
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