SANF 25 no 1 by Phyllis Johnson, SARDC
Members of Parliament will take their seats in the National Assembly of Mozambique on Monday 13 January, and the President-elect Daniel Chapo will be sworn in as President on Wednesday 15 January.
All elected members of the National Assembly have confirmed that they will take their seats, including the Podemos party (Optimistic party) which won the second highest number of seats after the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) and becomes the official opposition in the Assembly.
Podemos confirmed in a statement from the leader, Albano Forquilha that they will take up their parliamentary seats, a position that caused a dispute with Venâncio Mondlane, who was their presidential candidate although he is not a member of the party.
Opposition parties have said they reject the election results, and Mondlane has accused the Podemos party of violating a pre-election agreement with him by accepting seats.
This has been a rough road since the national and provincial elections held on 9 October 2024, especially since the preliminary results from the national electoral commission in November, and final results announced on 23 December by the Constitutional Council, the highest national body in matters of electoral law.
Mondlane emerged as the runner-up in the presidential election with 24 percent of the votes compared to 65 percent for the Frelimo candidate, but he claims that he won and says he will be inaugurated as President on the same date as Chapo, although there is no legal basis for this and he has provided no evidence.
Before the first announcement of results, Mondlane called for demonstrations, clearly pre-organized, and this set off a series of violent protests, mainly by youth below voting age who blocked roads with burning tyres, destroying and looting shops in the city centre.
They blocked the border entry with South Africa, preventing trucks from delivering or collecting goods at Maputo port. There were also incidents in the centre and north of the country.
Mondlane has been out of the country since the election, communicating through online broadcasts to facilitate the street protests that have caused considerable damage to the economy and to businesses through looting and destruction of infrastructure.
He has been in self-imposed exile in Europe, believed to have been in Portugal, the former colonial power, or in Spain. Interestingly, there is also a Podemos party in Spain that translates as “we can”.
The President-elect, Daniel Francisco Chapo, has clearly stated his priority that Mozambicans should live in peace, and he is already involved in discussions with the opposition parties.
He announced on 9 January that the political parties have agreed to form working groups, including technical committees to discuss action needed to resolve the post-election challenges.
“We have reached a consensus that we are going to continue working towards the reforms that are the main objective of the Mozambican people,” he said.
President-elect Chapo is a lawyer and jurist who has served as a provincial administrator in northern Mozambican, and most recently as Governor of Inhambane province in the south where he was popular for his action to implement policies, leaving no one behind.
He is secretary-general of the Frelimo party that liberated the country from Portuguese colonial rule leading to independence on 25 June 1975 under the leadership of Samora Machel. The President-elect is 47, born after independence.
“Let us build a society of love, peace, harmony, integrity, justice, and cohesion, in which we can all live in peace,” Chapo said often during the election campaign.
The runner-up returned to Mozambique on 8 January to try to lead more protests in Maputo city centre, but this was shut down by police using tear gas, and the gunshots that are ever-present at his rallies, however it is not clear who is shooting, whether the police or their opponents, or both, often in civilian clothes.
There have been no government statements on this issue, and there are cases elsewhere in which targeted shooting is done by pseudo gangs mingling in the crowd in civilian clothes or in uniform.
Pseudo groups have been used in the region since the days of liberation, during apartheid and destabilization, often wearing uniforms taken from the opposing side.
The initial demonstrations were said to protest the murder of Mondlane’s lawyer, Elvino Dias, and Paulo Guambe, an election agent for Podemos. It is not clear if this was internal to the parties or external, but investigations are underway.
It is rumoured that the assassination of the lawyers in central Maputo immediately after the announcement of results may have been an inside job to hide the lack of evidence as the candidate produced no documents to support allegations that he won the presidency.
It is very unclear how many people have been killed or injured during the various phases of the demonstrations, and the figures widely circulated, currently 300 and 500 respectively, originate with a murky online NGO called Platforma Electoral Decide, which is widely quoted. There are no other sources for these figures, which are not verified, and it is not clear how the information was collected or produced. Some civilians and members of the police force have been shot or killed in various parts of the country.
Most media articles circulated outside Mozambique are sourced from the Portuguese news agency, Lusa, although the national news agency, AIM, has been active in sharing information in English in southern Africa, mainly using the same sources but with additional analysis.
At year end, the Confederation of Mozambican Business Associations (CTA) announced that the destruction and looting had deprived 12,000 workers of their jobs, and that more than 500 companies had been attacked and looted of which “a large number will not be able to recover easily”.
A CTA official, Onorio Manuel told the media, “We are saying that about 40 percent of the industrial fabric of Mozambique has been vandalised.”
The preliminary figures resulted from an initial survey showing that Mozambican businesses had lost about 24.8 billion meticais (390 million US dollars), but losses by now would be much higher.
The Minister of Industry and Trade, Silvino Moreno, said after a meeting with the Mozambique-South Africa Chamber of Commerce, that shiploads of food and other goods have been stuck in Maputo port due to the difficulty of trucks moving the goods to destinations. Companies from both countries that use the Maputo Corridor have set up a crisis management group to guarantee security of goods leaving the port, with military escort.
The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has called for an immediate cessation of all hostilities.
The Tanzanian President and current Chairperson of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation, President Samia Suluhu Hassan, called on all parties to exercise restraint and refrain from acts that exacerbate violence and unrest.
“Our collective aspiration remains the restoration of harmony and stability in Mozambique,” she said, “in line with our shared vision of good governance, social cohesion and sustainable development in the region.” (sardc.net)
