DHLAKAMA CALLS FOR CARETAKER GOVERNMENT

Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the Mozambique’s main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, has called for the formation of a caretaker government to run the country until the next general elections in 2019.In a lengthy interview in Friday’s issue of the independent weekly “Savana”, Dhlakama repeated his claim that all elections in Mozambique, including the ones held on 15 November, have been fraudulent.He shied away from the term “government of national unity”, and was extremely vague as to how a caretaker government might be formed. The only thing he would state with certainty was that he would not be a member of such a government. Instead he would claim the status of “leader of the opposition”.

Dhlakama declared that everyone in the current government “must go”, with the possible exception of ambassadors. He said he was willing to draw up a list of people who could be appointed minister or national directors. The ruling Frelimo Party would also make proposals, “and we shall negotiate”.

“Frelimo has to sit down seriously with Renamo and we’ll design a strategy for how we survive until 2019”, Dhlakama insisted. “I am willing to help the country”.The long and rambling interview was peppered with insults. Thus he dismissed the chairperson of the National Elections Commission (CNE), Abdul Carimo, as “the moslem”, and claimed that the election campaign of the man who won, Frelimo candidate Filipe Nyusi, was “a crime” because Nyusi spent a lot of money.Dhlakama claimed that Carimo had been “obliged” to announce results that showed a victory for Nyusi and Frelimo. He ignored the awkward fact that the results announced by the CNE, giving Nyusi 57 per cent of the vote, are broadly in line with the parallel count organised by the Electoral Observatory, the largest and most credible group of Mozambican election observers.Dhlakama also claimed that it was the presence of Renamo members inside the electoral apparatus at all levels which had allowed the opposition to detect fraud. Yet before the elections Renamo had claimed that the point of placing opposition figures at all levels of the executive body, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), was not to detect fraud but to prevent it.Dhlakama claimed this time “it was easy to catch the people who committed fraud”. If that is the case, why have they not appeared in court?

For, at Renamo’s insistence, the electoral legislation was rewritten in February, and radically changed the appeals procedure. Preciously appeals against alleged fraud rose up the hierarchy of election commissions – district, provincial and national. But now any claim of illicit behaviour at a polling station must be submitted within 48 hours to the district court.Although it was Renamo which introduced this change, at the elections Renamo did not use the new appeals route. If the claims of a “mega-fraud” were true, one would have expected hundreds of appeals to the courts. Instead between them the three main parties (Renamo, Frelimo and the Mozambique Democratic Movement, MDM) only submitted 24 appeals in the entire country. Thus most of the courts in the 128 districts were faced with no electoral work at all.According to the summary presented by the Supreme Court last week, the Renamo appeals were all rejected either because they contained no evidence, or because they were submitted beyond the 48 hour deadline. Neither Dhlakama nor the “Savana” interviewer bothered to mention such awkward details.As for Filipe Nyusi, “Nobody voted for him”, declared Dhlakama. “Even in his own land (the northern province of Cabo Delgado) nobody voted for him. Its just half a dozen Makondes (Nyusi’s ethnic group) in Muidumbe, Nangade and Mueda, who don’t even amount to 30,000. They stuffed the ballot boxes. It’s all a puppet show. He knows he didn’t win the elections”.Dhlakama added he could not accept that all 14 seats in Gaza province would go to Frelimo “because no competition is permitted there”. But a few lines later in the interview he boasted of addressing a large rally in the Gaza town of Chibuto. He thought it was “trickery” for him to address a large crowd, be applauded, and then win no seats in the province.

His solution was simple, albeit entirely illegal. Either split the Gaza seats 50-50 between Frelimo and Renamo or remove Gaza completely from the incoming parliament. “One of the things I’m going to tell President Guebuza is that I will wage war with the Constitutional Council (the body that must eventually validate and proclaim election results) until they accept”, Dhlakama declared. “The solution is to annul the results from Gaza”.Dhlakama claimed that “our members” were thrown out of the Gaza districts of Chicualacuala, Mabalane, Massingir, Massangena, Chibuto and Guija. This is the first time such a sweeping claim has been made. Between them those districts had 356 polling stations, and at every one of them Renamo had the right to appoint a member of staff plus two monitors (one full and one supplementary).In addition every district elections commission contains two Renamo representatives, one of whom is the deputy chairperson. Each district branch of STAE has a Renamo assistant director, two Renamo assistant department heads, and two other staff members appointed by Renamo. Is Dhlakama claiming that all these hundreds of people were expelled from the Gaza districts? Or did Renamo never get round to appointing some of them?

Dhlakama also claimed that there was a low turnout in the opposition stronghold of Zambezia because “I believe that STAE received orders to strategically remove the names of people (from the electoral registers) because most of them vote for the opposition”.But Renamo is just as much inside STAE in Zambezia as anywhere else. Did the Renamo assistant provincial and district STAE directors in Zambezia not notice names being removed from the electoral registers? Perhaps Dhlakama is suggesting that all the STAE members his party appointed are incompetent.