
Venancio Mondlane cabeca de lista da Renamo lanca campanha eleitoral na Cidade de Maputo. Foto de Ferhat Momade
Maputo, 13 Jan (AIM) – Venancio Mondlane, the candidate for mayor of Maputo of Mozambique’s main opposition party, Renamo, in the recent municipal elections, on Friday announced that he is running for the post of President of Renamo.
Should he succeed, he will almost certainly become the Renamo candidate for President of the Republic in the general elections scheduled for 9 October.
Mondlane made his announcement, not on Maputo, but in the northern port city of Nacala. He was visiting the suspended mayor of Nacala, Raul Novinte, who is currently under house arrest for supposedly inciting collective disobedience during Renamo demonstrations rejecting the fraudulent election results in Nacala, where Novinte had been running for a further term of office.
On his arrival at Novinte’s house, according to the report on the independent television station STV, Mondlane took advantage of the occasion to announce his intention of running for the Renamo presidency.
“Here, in Nacala, where I am feeling the ideals of the first commander-in-chief of the forces of the Mozambique National Resistance, I want to announce to Mozambique and to the world that I, Venancio Mondlane, a senior member of the Renamo Party, am available and I will advance as a candidate for President of Renamo at the next Congress”, he declared.
Presumably he invoked Renamo’s first leader, Andre Matsangaissa, in order to claim legitimacy among older members of Renamo’s military wing. He cannot possibly have met Matsangaissa, who died in 1977.
On 4 January, the Renamo national spokesperson, Jose Manteigas, declared that the party’s current leader, Ossufo Momade, will be its candidate for President of the Republic in October.
Mondlane, and the Renamo mayor of the central city of Quelimane, Manuel de Araujo, immediately denounced the statements by Manteigas as contrary to the Renamo statutes, which state that the party’s candidate must be chosen by a Renamo Congress.
Momade was elected at a Renamo Congress in January 2019. His statutory term of office ends next Wednesday – but so far no date has been fixed for the Congress at which his successor will be chosen.
Mondlane was one of Renamo’s most successful candidates in the municipal elections. Although the candidate of the ruling Frelimo Party, Razaque Manhique, was declined the winner, a parallel vote count by credible civil society organisations showed that in reality Mondlane won the election.
Manteigas argues that the victories of Renamo candidates such as Mondlane and Araujo were due to the leadership given by Momade. Their good results, he said, did not make them better than Momade and eligible to lead the party.
Mondlane’s choice of Nacala as the place to make his announcement was no accident. Raul Novinte has also clashed with the Maputo-based Renamo leadership. Against the leadership’s advice, Novinte organized a boycott by Renamo supporters of the repeat municipal election held in several Nacala polling stations on 10 December.
Mondlane has expressed his solidarity with Novinte, and the latter reciprocated on Friday.
“The people support you”, he told Mondlane. “The people love you. The people want you to be President of Renamo”.
(AIM)
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