Maputo, 13 Oct (AIM) – The elections commission in the central Mozambican district of Quelimane on Friday morning declared that the ruling Frelimo Party has won the election for the municipal assembly in Quelimane city.
There were 130,591 registered voters in Quelimane, of whom 76,634 cast their votes. This was a turnout of 58.7 per cent: thus over 41 per cent of the Quelimane electorate did not vote.
The ballot boxes at 180 polling stations contained 76,506 valid votes (the other 128 ballots were blank or invalid votes).
Frelimo won with 38,595 votes (50.45 per cent of the valid votes). Renamo took 35,086 votes (43.45 per cent), while the MDM took 2,561 votes (3.35 per cent). The remaining votes were shared among a handful of minor parties.
This is by no means the end of the story. These results must now go to the Zambezia provincial branch of STAE (Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat). From the provincial count, the results will go the National Elections Commission (CNE), and then to the Constitutional Council, the highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law for validation.
Renamo can be expected to lodge appeals at every stage of the count.
The current Renamo mayor, Manuel de Araujo, is one of the best known and most eloquent leaders of Renamo. He first became mayor in a by-election in 2011, when he was the candidate, not of Renamo, but of the MDM.
In the municipal elections held nationally in 2013, Araujo was re-elected mayor, again on the MDM’s ticket. But five years later, in the 2018 municipal elections, he defected from the MDM and rejoined Renamo.
He has thus won three municipal elections in a row, and if the district commission’s figures are confirmed this will be his first defeat.
The first district commission to declare a result was not Quelimane, but Pemba, capital of the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where Frelimo received almost two thirds of the valid votes.
According to the Commission, Frelimo took 64.44 per cent of the vote, Renamo 27.09 per cent, and the MDM 7.67 per cent.
Renamo and the MDM both claimed that these results are fraudulent. However, Cabo Delgado, the province where Frelimo began its armed national liberation struggle in 1964, has always been a stronghold of the ruling party. Frelimo has never lost an election in Pemba.
(AIM)
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