Maputo — The Constitutional Council, Mozambique's highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, has received the nominations of 11 people for the presidential election scheduled for 9 October.
The front runners are the candidates of the three parliamentary parties - the ruling Frelimo Party and the opposition Renamo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM).
At a meeting of the party's Central Committee in early May, Frelimo elected the then governor of the southern province of Inhambane, Daniel Chapo, as its candidate.
This was a surprise choice, since Chapo is not well-known outside of Inhambane, and is not yet a member of the most powerful Frelimo body, the Political Commission.
The man who was widely tipped to become the presidential candidate, General Secretary Roque Silva, resigned after losing the vote, and within days Chapo was elected general secretary.
Renamo's candidate is its leader, Ossufo Momade, who was re-elected President of Renamo at a Congress held in the central municipality of Alto Molocue on 15-17 May, scoring an absolute majority of votes and thus easily beating his main opponent, Elias Dhlakama, the younger brother of the party's previous leader, Afonso Dhlakama, who died of diabetes in 2018.
The Congress was marked by successful attempts to prevent Momade's main adversary, Venancio Mondlane, from attending. He had intended to stand for the Renamo presidency, but that proved impossible when he was not allowed to enter the tent where the Congress was held.
Mondlane subsequently resigned from Renamo, and announced his intention of running for President of the Republic as an independent. He was endorsed by the Democratic Alliance Coalition (CAD), a grouping of nine extra-parliamentary parties, and claims to have collected over 100,000 supporting signatures.
There were no such dramas in choosing the MDM's candidate. He is the party's leader, Lutero Simango, brother of the MDM's founder, Davis Simango, who died of Covid-19 in 2020.
A potential rival, Albano Carige, mayor of the central city of Beira, withdrew his nomination and announced full support for Simango.
The other seven candidates are all from minor parties that have no representation in provincial or municipal assemblies, let alone in the national parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.
The most prominent of these, Mario Albino, is a dissident from the MDM, who set up his own party, the Nampula-based AMUSI (Action of the United Movement for All-Round Salvation).
In 2018 Albino ran for Mayor of Nampula and won just 4.2 per cent of the vote. This was much better than his showing in the 2019 presidential election, when he was the only candidate from a minor party whose papers were accepted by the Constitutional Council. He won 0.73 per cent of the presidential vote, and AMUSI won 0.45 per cent of the vote in the parliamentary election.
Miguel Mabote has been on the fringes of Mozambican politics since the first multi-party elections in 1994. He heads the Labour Party (PT) which, despite its name, has no connection with the organized Mozambican labour movement. The one distinctive policy of the PT is that it wants to bring back the death penalty.
The other candidates represent deeply obscure political groups. They are Domingos Zucula, of the Ecology Party (PEMO); Dorinda Eduardo, of the National Movement for the Recovery of Mozambican Unity (MONARUMO); Feliciano Machava, of the Movement for Development and National Reconciliation (MDR); Rafael Bata, of the United Republican Party of Mozambique (PRUMO); and Manuel Carlos Dias dos Santos Pinto Junior. AIM has not yet discovered what organization is backing this last named candidate.
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This list does not mean that all 11 names will appear on the ballot paper in October. The Constitutional Council warns that it is now looking carefully at all the documentation submitted by the candidates to ensure that they meet the legal requirements.
In previous presidential elections, the main problems faced by candidates from minor parties was that they had to submit a minimum of 10,000 supporting signatures from registered voters. Each of those signatures must be recognised by a notary. There must be no duplication - no voter may support more than one candidate.
The voter roll is now computerized, allowing the Constitutional Council to check the validity of the names and voter card numbers for each and every signature.
