Maputo, 13 Jul (AIM) – Mozambique’s first Justice Minister, Rui Baltazar dos Santos Alves, died in Maputo on Saturday morning, at the age of 91.
Baltazar was born in Maputo in 1933, and took his law degree at the University of Coimbra in 1956. He was a clandestine anti-fascist, and used his legal skills to defend Mozambican nationalists in the colonial courts in the final years of Portuguese rule.
In the first post-independence government, appointed by President Samora Machel in 1975, he became the Justice Minister. Three years later, Machel moved him to the Finance Ministry, where he faced the Herculean task of drawing up budgets for a country that was being systematically destroyed by apartheid South Africa.
He held this post until 1986, when he became Vice-Chancellor of the country’s largest institution of higher education, the Eduardo Mondlane University, until 1990.
The then president, Joaquim Chissano, used Baltazar’s talents in diplomacy, appointing him the country’s ambassador to Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. He was also an adviser to Chissano in 2002-2003.
He became the first chairperson of the newly established Constitutional Council, which was Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law. He held this post from 2003 to 2009.
In a tribute posted on his Facebook page, one of the country’s most prominent economists, Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, wrote that Rui Baltazar “never turned his back on the struggle for democracy, for social justice, and for the equality of all before the law. We owe him much of the pluralist space, even though it is reduced, that our society has”.
Writing on his Facebook page on Friday, the current President, Filipe Nyusi, lamented Baltazar’s death, describing him as “an outstanding patriot who dedicated his entire life to the service of the Mozambican motherland”.
“Even as a young man, he stood out as a lawyer, defending various nationalists arrested by the PIDE/DGS (the much hated Portuguese political police)”, said Nyusi. After independence, he added, Baltazar became one of the founders of Mozambican justice.
Baltazar insisted that people who committed fraud during Mozambican elections should be treated in the same way as any other criminal.
Thus, in a Maputo seminar on the country’s electoral legislation in 2016, Baltazar expressed his anger at the failure of the country’s legal system to punish people who violate the election laws. Despite well attested cases of fraud, and of violence during election campaign, very few people have ever been brought to trial for such offences.
Baltazar had direct experience of fraudulent behaviour when would-be presidential candidates presented the Constitutional Council with documents that were obviously forged. One requirement for any presidential candidate is a list of at least 10,000 supporters, whose signatures must be verified by a notary.
Baltazar noted that, in the 2009 elections, one of the would-be candidates presented just ten valid signatures. At the time the Council noted that several candidates from minor political parties presented lists of names that had obviously just been copied from an electoral register, and that signatures had been added that were clearly by the same person. Although forging documents is a serious offence, the Public Prosecutor’s Office took no action against these fraudulent candidates.
“The more electoral offences are committed, the more this behavior becomes normal, banal, and the less seriousness can we expect from our elections”, warned Baltazar”.
“Something must be done to put an end to this impunity”, he declared. “It is a crime as serious as any other crime. We must regard the people who commit these electoral offences as criminals, as delinquents, regardless of what party they may belong to”.
(AIM)
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