Maputo, 24 Feb (AIM) – Mozambique’s main opposition party, Renamo, has promised to appeal against the decision of the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, to remove from the agenda for the current parliamentary sitting, two Renamo bills planned to pave the way for elections to district assemblies in 2024.
“We have a jurisdictional council, we have meetings of party cadres, and we have a political commission who are currently analysing profoundly what legal alternatives Renamo will take”, the rapporteur of the Renamo parliamentary group, Venancio Mondlane, told reporters at a Friday press conference in Maputo.
At Renamo’s insistence, district elections were included in the decentralisation package agreed between the government and Renamo in 2019. Amendments to the Mozambican constitution on decentralisation were then passed, including a commitment to hold the first district elections in 2024.
But the Constitution says nothing about what powers district assemblies will have, how much they will cost, or even how many members will sit in them. President Filipe Nyusi last year called for a nationwide reflection on the feasibility of holding district elections at all.
This infuriated Renamo which posed as a defender of the Constitution. Since the Constitution states that district elections will be held in 2024, then they must be held in that year, Renamo argues. The two bills it submitted would provide the necessary legal framework for holding the elections.
Mondlane stressed that, under the Constitution, Renamo has every right to appeal against the removal of its bills from the parliamentary agenda.
“Logically, Renamo will use the possibility that the law allows”, he said. “We aren’t going to stop. There are various instruments of appeal that we shall use”.
“If Renamo were to stop this struggle, that would mean agreeing with a retreat into monarchy”, Mondlane claimed. “All the struggle waged by Renamo over about four decades seeks to bring full democracy to Mozambicans”.
It was the Assembly’s governing board, its Standing Commission, which had decided to remove the Renamo bills from the agenda. But Mondlane said that, in reality, the decision had been taken by the ruling Frelimo Party, which has an absolute majority on the Standing Commission.
The Renamo bills, Mondlane said, are the basis for district elections to take place. “If we don’t have a legal basis, the elections are not viable”, he pointed out.
District elections, he claimed, are the result of “Renamo’s struggle to return power to people, a struggle which should culminate in decentralisation. This is the agreement that President Filipe Nyusi reached with the late President of Renamo, Afonso Dhlakama”.
Frelimo’s position in parliament, Mondlane accused, “is a clear sign that there is no interest in maintaining the spirit that led to the signing of the agreement between the two Presidents”.
Presumably Mondlane was referring to the peace agreement signed in August 2019 between Nyusi and Dhlakama’s successor, Ossufo Momade. That agreement has never been published so we do not know what, if anything, it said about district assemblies.
Yet Mondlane declared that “the basis for the entire process of reconciliation and peace lies in the agreement to hold district elections”.
There is no popular demand for district assemblies, and there is an obvious potential for them to overlap or even to clash with the existing provincial and municipal assemblies.
(AIM)
Mz/pf (673)
