
Candidato Presidencial da FRELIMO, Daniel Francisco Chapo, discursando no Showmício do Encerramento da Campanha Eleitoral. Foto de Carlos Júnior
Maputo, 26 Oct (AIM) – Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo Party has postponed a planned “victory march” through the streets of Maputo.
The march was intended to celebrate Frelimo’s overwhelming victory in the 9 October general elections. The results, declared by the National Elections Commission (CNE) on Thursday, claimed that the Frelimo candidate, Daniel Chapo, had won the presidential election with over 70 per cent of the vote.
In the parliamentary election, Frelimo won 195 of the 250 seats, while in the provincial election Frelimo won a majority in all ten provincial assemblies. For the provincial assemblies, the constituency is the district, and Frelimo won a majority in all the districts bar one. Only in the city of Beira did the opposition won.
The opposition parties attributes these results to electoral fraud, and a great deal of evidence for ballot box stuffing and other forms of fraud has been produced.
Angry crowds on Thursday and Friday held street demonstrations in Maputo and other cities, in protest at what they regarded as fraudulent results. They were obeying the call from independent presidential candidate Venancio Mondlane to bring the country to a standstill.
Mondlane claims he has proof that he won the presidential election, but he has not yet published it.
In the initial euphoria of victory, Frelimo called its supporters to a victory march that was to have started in the heart of the city at 07.00 on Saturday morning.
But the march was suddenly postponed. When journalists from the anti-Frelimo publication “Canal de Mocambique” turned up, there was no sign of a march, and they were told it had postponed to an indefinite date in the future “for security reasons”.
Life in the city was returning to normal, after two days in which shops, banks and many other businesses were shut down.
But Mondlane has promised further demonstrations. In his latest broadcast from a hideout believed to be somewhere in South Africa, he said that what he called “phase three” of the protests will begin on Monday.
He gave no details. Phase One was a one day “national general strike” last Monday. Phase Two was two days of demonstrations on Thursday and Friday timed to coincide with the release of the election results.
A further element in the post-election tension was a shutdown of the Internet on Friday afternoon, which was immediately blamed on the government.
The shutdown began at about 14.00 and continued until Saturday morning. It was claimed that the government was trying to prevent news about the demonstrations spreading across the Internet.
The shutdown only affected mobile Internet users. Anyone buying megabytes from any of the three mobile phone service providers found that they could not access the Internet.
But other internet service providers, such as the cable television company, TVCabo, were completely unaffected by the shutdown.
Attempts to contact the mobile phone companies (the publicly owned TMcel, and the private Vodacom and Movitel) on Friday afternoon were fruitless. Their head offices in Maputo were deserted, apparently because of Mondlane’s strike call.
(AIM)
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