SENIOR RENAMO FIGURE RESIGNS IN BEIRA

Rui Bulha, a senior member of Mozambique’s main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, in the central port city of Beira, has reigned from the party, because he was not allowed to occupy a vacant parliamentary seat, reports Friday’s issue of the Maputo daily “Noticias”.The vacancy occurred when a Renamo parliamentary deputy, Fernando Mbararano, died at the weekend. Parliamentary elections in Mozambique are held on the basis of provincial party lists. The norm is that, in the event of deaths or resignations of deputies, the next person on the list occupies the vacant seat.Bulha claims that this means that he should have replaced Mbararano in the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, but instead, the vacancy has been filled, on the instructions of the Renamo leadership, by Manuel Bissopo, a former Renamo political delegate in Beira. According to Bulha, Bissopo was not even on the list of Renamo supplementary candidates for Sofala province.“I feel that an injustice has been done to me”, said Bulha, “first by Renamo itself, and also by the leadership of the Assembly, which has allowed this to happen. For there are official lists, on which I am the Renamo top supplementary candidate for Sofala”.Bulha promptly resigned from the party, giving his membership card and all Renamo leaflets and flags in his possession to the party’s general secretary Ussufo Momade.He blamed Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama for the current state of the party. “Dhlakama does everything upside down, and I want to corroborate what Vitano Singano said about this”, added Bulha. Singano heads a group of Renamo dissidents in Beira, trying to remove Dhlakama from the leadership of the party.“Dhlakama likes money and I am under pressure from Pastor Carlos, from a local church, because he lent Dhlakama 300,000 meticais (about 9,700 US dollars, at current exchange rates) some years ago, and has not paid it back”, declared Bulha. “I ask you – can a person like this be a head of state?”“I’m suffocated and I can’t take it any more”, said Bulha. “Now I’m going to rest a bit, but I remain a man of the opposition”.