Maputo — The Constitutional Council, Mozambique's highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, has rejected an attempt by a minor political party, the United Congress of Democrats (CDU), to deny Venancio Mondlane a place on the ballot paper for the presidential election scheduled for 9 October.
Mondlane was a prominent member of the main opposition party, Renamo, and was the Renamo candidate for mayor of Maputo in last year's municipal elections. He intended to stand for the Renamo presidency at the party's Congress, held in mid-May in the central municipality of Alto Molocue.
But the Renamo leadership refused to allow Mondlane to attend the Congress, much less compete for the Renamo presidency. Mondlane resigned from Renamo and is now running for the national presidency backed by the Democratic Alliance Coalition (CAD), a grouping of half a dozen tiny political parties.
Last Friday, the CDU submitted an appeal to the Constitutional Council, demanding that Mondlane be barred from using the CAD symbol, which is a pigeon.
The CDU was one of the original members of the CAD, but it pulled out of the coalition a few months after it had been founded in 2018.
Cited by the German agency, DW Africa, the CDU leader, Joao Namua, admitted that his party had not been a member of the coalition for the past six years, but argued that the CAD cannot go on using symbols adopted at a time when the CDU was a member.
The CAD election agent, Elvino Dias, asked why the CDU had chosen now as the time to challenge the use of the pigeon symbol. He pointed out that the CAD had taken part in last year's municipal elections, with the same symbol, and the CDU had not protested.
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The Constitutional Council, in a ruling issued on Wednesday, made short work of the CDU appeal. It pointed out that the CDU is not a member of the coalition. In fact, the CDU has registered with the National Elections Commission (CNE) to stand in October's general elections as an individual party and not in alliance with anybody else.
Its attempt to interfere with the CAD's choice of symbol was therefore "illegitimate'.
This was the second attempt to have the Council order the CAD to change its symbol. Renamo leader Ossufo Momade had claimed that voters might confuse the CAD pigeon with its own symbol, which is a partridge.
Momade said this might lead to "irreparable confusion' in the minds of the electorate, when they were asked to "vote for the bird' - though AIM has never heard any Renamo figure calling on the party's supporters to "vote for the bird'.
But Momade had jumped the gun: the Council rejected his appeal last week on the grounds that it was still considering the paperwork of all the presidential hopefuls. This implies that Momade might still be able to pursue his complaint against the CAD symbol, now that the Council has approved the presidential candidates.
