via RENAMO threatens protests against election results 4 January 2015
Mozambique’s main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, on Saturday threatened it would hold nationwide protests against last week’s ruling by the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, which confirmed the victory of the ruling Frelimo Party and its presidential candidate, Filipe Nyusi, in the general elections of 15 October.
Speaking at a Saturday press conference, the Renamo Maputo City delegate, Arlindo Bila, said “we are aware there are no easy paths to achieve justice. So as from today we are starting the political march to attain electoral justice, and to teach (outgoing President Armando) Guebuza that power is not snatched, but is won”.
Bila gave no details as to the organization of this “political march”, such as where it would be held, its route, or who would lead it.
He declared that Renamo reaffirms its belief that Nyusi has no legitimacy to form a government. “It is Renamo and (the party’s leader and presidential candidate) Afonso Dhlakama who have to form the government, because those who have the people on their side always win”.
This is rather different from the position repeatedly expressed by Dhlakama himself, which is that a “caretaker government”, in which both Frelimo and Renamo appoint ministers, should run the country for the next five years.
Renamo claims that the October elections were characterized by massive fraud, and that in reality Dhlakama won 80 per cent of the presidential vote. It has never presented any evidence for this claim.
The figures given by the National Elections Commission (CNE), and generally validated by the Constitutional Council, are that Nyusi won 57 per cent of the vote, and Dhlakama 36.6 per cent. The parallel count by the Electoral Observatory, the largest and most credible group of Mozambican election observers, produced a very similar result.
“These elections were the most fraudulent that history has ever known”, declared Bila, apparently unaware that Renamo said much the same about the 2009 elections. “This was a fraud prepared down to the smallest detail by those who have an insatiable greed for power, to the point of using the most ridiculous and bloodthirsty methods, including ballot box stuffing in favour of Frelimo and its candidate”.
He claimed that polling station results sheets had been falsified in favour of Frelimo and Nyusi, that the police had gone into the polling stations and opened fire on monitors from opposition parties, and that ballots cast for the opposition had been deliberately invalidated.
Yet on polling day itself Renamo did not seem to notice any of this. Thanks to the politicization of the electoral bodies which Renamo had demanded as the price for ending its low-level insurrection in the centre of the country, Renamo had its appointees at every level of the electoral machinery, from the polling stations up to the CNE.
During the elections Renamo also had 26,761 monitors at the 17,010 polling stations – yet only a handful of them reported any fraud or irregularities.
The kits for each and every polling station contained printed sheets where monitors were entitled to write down any complaints or protests. These went unused. Not a single monitor filed a protest at any of the polling stations.
A few did lodge appeals with the district courts, all of which were rejected for lack of evidence or because they were submitted beyond the deadline of 48 hours after close of polls established by the electoral law.
In the entire country only 24 cases were submitted to district courts, and several of these came from Frelimo and from the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM). If there had been fraud on the scale claimed by Renamo, one would have expected many hundreds of such cases.
This is not the first time Renamo has called for protests against election results. After its defeat in 2009, Renamo threatened repeatedly that it would hold demonstrations across the entire country. In fact, not a single Renamo demonstration took place.
Although only a few days earlier Renamo had announced that AIM was banned from attending its events, on Saturday an AIM reporter was able to enter and cover the press conference without any difficulty.
COMMENTS