Renamo leader calls his main opponent “Judas”

Maputo, 15 Apr (AIM) – The leader of Mozambique’s main opposition party, Renamo, Ossufo Momade, on Sunday compared his main critic within the party, Venancio Mondlane, to Judas Iscariot.

Speaking in Maputo at the opening of a meeting of the Renamo National Council, Momade devoted much of his speech to a thinly veiled attack against Mondlane, although he never mentioned him by name.

Mondlane was the Renamo candidate for mayor of Maputo in last year’s municipal elections. He led repeated street demonstration against the fraudulent election results announced by the National Elections Commission (CNE), which claimed that the ruling Frelimo Party had won in almost all the major cities, including Maputo.

However, parallel counts of the votes undertaken by Renamo and by civil society bodies showed that Renamo had won in Maputo. The Constitutional Council, the country’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, corrected the CNE’s results, eliminating some of the more obvious frauds, notably by granting victory in the central city of Quelimane to Renamo.

In Maputo, the Council transferred tens of thousands of votes from Frelimo to Renamo – but that still left a Frelimo majority on the municipal assembly. The Renamo demonstrations against the results continued, and it was Mondlane, not Momade, who became the main spokesperson for the party.

Mondlane also accused Momade of violating the Renamo statutes, notably by failing to announce the date for a Renamo Congress.

The Congress should be held every five years. The last one was in 2019, and elected Momade President of Renamo. But his term of office expired on 17 January, and Mondlane argued that all his acts as President of the Party since then should be declared null and void.

Mondlane appealed to the Maputo City Law Court, repeatedly taking out injunctions against the Renamo leadership. This earned him furious rebukes from Momade and his supporters – but they gave way on the key point of the Congress, which will be held in Zambezia province in mid-May.

Momade told the National Council, in an obvious reference to Mondlane, that Renamo contains members “who parade through the television stations and the courts in search of political party legitimacy”.

He said that, after the 2023 municipal elections, it was expected that Renamo members “would maintain the necessary calm so that we could focus on the ideal and common goal of identifying our political adversary and our strategy for the elections of 2024”.

But instead of strengthening the party’s “cohesion, discipline, dynamism and spirit of creativity”, unnamed Renamo members went to the media and the courts in what he described as “a failed attempt to invent the wheel, and an unhappy attitude of wiping out the history of Renamo”.

Momade claimed that the Renamo leadership had never forgotten that, under the party’s statutes, a new Party Congress had to be called. It had not been convened earlier because of “the intensive political activity of 2023 and 2024”.

A meeting of this nature could not be held merely because “a member who is a Judas went to complain to the courts and to the media” – an implied comparison between Venancio Mondlane and the archetypal figure of betrayal, Judas Iscariot.

Turning to the overall situation in the country, Momade said that the extreme violence carried out by islamist terrorists in some districts of the northern province of Cabo Delgado is a threat to effective peace throughout the country.

He declared that “without peace there is no social harmony, tranquility and development. Unfortunately, our country is still not enjoying this precious commodity because of the war waged by the terrorists in Cabo Delgado”.

He believed that following the impending withdrawal of the SADC Military Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM), supposedly for lack of funds, a more chaotic situation can be predicted.

“We call on the Head of State to opt for credible alliances that truly show solidarity with Mozambique”, he said.

Momade also appreciated positively the results achieved between the government and his party in the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programme, which has allowed the demobilization of over 5,000 members of the Renamo militia.

“That’s how we’ve gradually managed to integrate 46 officers into the Mozambican Police (PRM) and recently around 100 combatants have finished their training to also be included in these ranks. It’s important to note that since the Rome General Peace Agreement in 1992, we had never achieved this feat, which is small in terms of numbers, but significant”, he said.

Also as part of the DDR, Momade added, “we were able to reach agreements that allowed for the establishment of pensions and the creation of economic sustainability projects for our combatants.”

“Currently, of the 5,221 cases submitted to the Ministry of Economy and Finance for the purpose of establishing combatants’ pensions, 3,486 had been sent to the Administrative Tribunal by March of this year, of which 2,522 have already been approved and 1,935 pensions are being paid”, he said.

As for the projects of economic sustainability for former Renamo guerrillas, Momade complained that progress was very slow. “If it depended on our leadership, this process would have been finished by now”, he said.

(AIM)

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