FRELIMO WILL UNITE AROUND NYUSSI - GUEBUZA

Mozambican President Armando Guebuza declared on Sunday night that the ruling Frelimo Party will now rally round Defence Minister Filipe Nyussi as the party’s sole candidate for the presidential election scheduled for 15 October.Addressing the closing session of a four day meting of the Frelimo Central Committee, Guebuza said the members of the committee will leave the room “determined to unite around him so that, though our words and acts, particularly among the electorate and in the media, we shall make him the victorious candidate”.As President of Frelimo, Guebuza added, “I reaffirm that we shall give you, Comrade Nyussi, all the support necessary to win an overwhelming victory in the presidential election”.In the election of its candidate, he said, Frelimo had shown that it possesses “an unbreakable internal democracy. The debates were heated, always full of comradeship and impregnated with the responsibility that we have and we feel for the destiny of our Mozambican motherland”.During the meeting, Guebuza added, “each of us put forward our points of view freely, openly, frankly, and without time limits. Obviously they did not always converge with the views of other comrades”.Nonetheless, consensus had been reached “informed by realism and by the maturity and experience of a party that is fifty years old”. That consensus “has once again contributed to the internal cohesion of our Frelimo and to its vitality as a force that binds together all social strata”. “Thanks to the consensus achieved, we swore that the candidate emerging from this democratic process within Frelimo would be the candidate of all of us”, he stressed.He pointed out that Nyussi, born within a Frelimo family, had grown up and studied within the ideals of Frelimo. Guebuza cited Nyussi himself who had said “I am a worker who became a manager and then a politician, a child of Frelimo, with an appropriate profile to be a candidate for the Presidency”.Guebuza said Nyussi was a tribute to Frelimo’s strategy of training young Mozambicans “including those, like him, of peasant origin, to master science and technology, so that they can become the cadres of tomorrow, faithfully serving the people and the cause of the nation. Thus Comrade Nyussi represents Frelimo’s investment in youth”.Nyussi’s candidacy had been legitimised by “a fair, transparent and credible election” in the Central Committee. This was not a process in which there were winners and losers, Guebuza stressed – instead “we focused our attentions on strengthening internal cohesion and on the imperative of consolidating national unity”.“Through internal cohesion, we shall always be in better conditions to close our ranks against all the forces plotting to sow suspicions, confusion and misunderstandings amongst us, and divert us from what is essential right now, which is to win the 15 October elections”, he declared.“Cohesive, we complement each other in building this victory”, he added. “Cohesive, we strengthen our vigilance against those who might try to distort or subvert the norms by which our party operates”.Unity did not mean eliminating diversity, Guebuza said. “Amongst us, it is not a problem that each of us belongs to this or that ethnic group, speaks this or that language, or professes this or that religion”. The problem, he continued, “begins when citizens with interests opposed to our healthy coexistence and to national unity try to manipulate our differences in order to divide us. In the final analysis, undermining national unity means destroying the nation itself”.The Central Committee had therefore “reaffirmed the need for all of us, for Frelimo, to continue fighting, without any complacency, and with all our strength against tribalism, racism, regionalism, localism and nepotism. Each one of us should ask every day how we have been contributing to national unity”.