Maputo — The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on Thursday night passed the second and final reading of a bill submitted by the parliamentary group of the ruling Frelimo Party, which amends the Constitution to remove the date of 2024 for holding the first elections for district assemblies.
Three votes were taken during the day - on the first reading, the second reading and a final summation - and they were all the same. Every Frelimo deputy in the room voted for the amendment, and hence against district elections in 2024. Every deputy from the two opposition parties, Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), voted against and insisted that the elections be held in 2024.
Ingeniously, Renamo insisted that the Frelimo amendment was invalid because no referendum had been held on changing the Constitution.
It is true that the Constitution does envisage holding referendums on any major changes to the Mozambican constitutional order. But the Constitution has been changed repeatedly since the introduction of a multi-party system in 1990, and no referendum was ever held.
The idea that a referendum should be held merely on altering the date of an election would be laughable were it not for the threats from some Renamo deputies that passing the Frelimo amendment might pave the way for a renewed wave of violence.
Renamo deputy Ezeqiel Gusse argued that the Frelimo amendment violated the time limits for changing the constitution. No constitutional amendment can be passed within the first five years after the last time the Constitution were amended.
But Antonio Boene, the Frelimo deputy who chairs the Assembly's Commission on Constitutional and Legal Matters, pointed out that the last time constitutional amendments took effect was on 12 June 2018. It was now 3 August 2023, so there was no question of violating the constitutional time frame for amendments.
Gusse shifted his ground and said that the Frelimo amendment should have been submitted 90 days before the start of the debate. Boene retorted that the amendment had indeed been deposited 90 days in advance.
At no time during the debate did any Renamo deputy mention the attempt made in June by Renamo leader Ossufo Momade to seek a compromise solution. Momade had suggested that the constitutional requirement for elections in 2024 could be met by holding elections in some of the 154 districts, but not all of them.
But Momade does not sit in the Assembly, and the Renamo parliamentary group paid no attention to his suggestion.
Among the objections to district elections in 2024 is the sheer cost. Frelimo deputies cited a study that put the cost of holding elections in 154 districts at over 46 billion meticais (about 720 million US dollars). There was no way that the Mozambican state budget could afford this.
Frelimo deputy Aires Ali, a former Prime Minister and a member of the Frelimo Political Commission, warned that holding district elections in 2024 "gives us a socio-economic and financial problem that we cannot ignore'.
"Anyone who thinks that postponing the district elections is a mistake and a violation of the Constitution has no vision of the future', said Ali.
No Renamo or MDM deputy said what they believed the district assemblies would do. They assumed that elected district administrators would do a better job than the current, appointed officials. But there would be no direct election of administrators, just as there is no direct election of city mayors or provincial governors. These elections are on a party list system: whoever heads the winning party list in a municipality or province will become mayor or governor. The same system will apply in districts.
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Frelimo also warned that elected district assemblies might make the existing provincial assemblies irrelevant or powerless. Each province consists of a number of districts: if each of the districts has its own assembly, then what would the provincial assemblies do?
There are no answers to such questions in the Constitution. The amendments of 2018 did not consider the relations between provincial, district and municipal assemblies. In some cases (notably the provincial capitals), districts and municipalities cover much the same area. Would it even make sense to elect a district assembly that overlapped with a municipal assembly?
The Frelimo amendment fixes no date for the first district assembly elections. It simply states that the elections will be held when the conditions (material, financial and legal) are met.
The amendment was passed with all 178 Frelimo deputies in the chamber voting in favour while the 44 Renamo and five MDM deputies voted against.
