President Filipe Nyusi on 10 August insisted that there must be further reflection on the viability of holding elections to district assemblies in 2024, as proposed in the decentralisation package adopted in 2018.
Speaking in the northern city of Nampula, at the opening of a national conference on decentralisation, the President said participants should be free to discuss the pros and cons of holding the district elections. He stressed that he was not giving any instructions but was asking people to look deeper into the matter.
This is the second time President Nyusi has asked for a reflection on district elections, to predictable howls of outrage from the main opposition party, Renamo, which points out that the district elections are in the Mozambican Constitution.
Last May, at the end of a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Frelimo Party in Maputo, President Nyusi invited all political parties and civil society organisations to reflect on the feasibility and sustainability of pushing ahead with district elections in 2024.
There are currently 154 districts (and rather more if urban districts are included). Nobody has yet calculated how much the district assemblies will cost.
They will certainly complicate national elections. Voters will already be faced with three ballot papers in 2024, for the presidential, parliamentary, and provincial assembly elections. Adding a fourth, for the district assemblies, would inevitably lengthen the time taken to count the votes and declare the results. Even discounting the possibility of deliberate fraud, tired polling station staff, working from 05.00 in the morning, are bound to make more mistakes, if the count is extended deeper into the night.
Just as with the municipalities and the provinces, the district assembly elections will be organised on a party list basis. The head of the list of whichever party wins will become the new district administrator. The administrator heads a district government, known as the District Executive Council, which answers to the District Assembly.
The Constitution says nothing else. The powers of the District Administrator and the District Executive Council are to be fixed by laws which do not yet exist.
Even the size of the district assemblies is not yet known. But it seems certain that they will provide hundreds, if not thousands of new jobs, with wages and allowances adding to the pressures on the state budget
Those new jobs give significant powers of patronage to the political parties participating in the elections, and doubtless, this is why Renamo is so insistent that the elections should go ahead.
President Nyusi told the Nampula meeting that decentralisation is an irreversible government commitment, although he recognised that it is an unfinished process. "The misunderstandings, overlaps, and even involuntary frictions should be taken as part of a new process and should not create nightmares for us", the President said. There have now been two decades of decentralised governance, and so President Nyusi believed that "decentralisation is not imposed by itself, as it arises to meet the needs of local communities and there is no perfect model".
He thought that credible decentralisation "contributes to greater administrative efficiency, transparency, and citizen participation, and expands the possibilities for democracy, good governance, and local development".
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The constitutional amendments of 2018 on decentralisation were "a historic milestone", he claimed, but they did not constitute "a finished model".
"Mozambicans should not be afraid to correct what could be better", stressed President Nyusi. "It is up to Mozambicans themselves to accept, believe, perfect, and improve this model with a cool head, humility and serenity, always keeping in mind that decentralisation is not finished."
"Where there is decentralisation there must be peace and harmony so that we can develop", he added. The last three years of governance in Mozambique, "are part of an embryonic journey of decentralisation that has allowed lessons to be drawn and challenges to be identified for strategies that include innovations, drawing on national solutions to Mozambican problems and seeking inspiration from other places when necessary".
