The delegations
appointed by Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi and by the leader of the Renamo
rebels, Afonso Dhlakama, have reached agreement that a package of legislation
on decentralization should be drawn up by November, for presentation to the
Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.
The agreement was announced on Wednesday morning
at the end of a meeting between the government/Renamo Joint Commission, which
discussed only the first point on its agenda – namely the demand by Renamo that
it should be allowed to govern the six provinces which it claims to have won in
the October 2014 general elections.
A brief statement, read out to reporters by the
head of the Renamo side, Jose Manteigas, said that the two delegations had
reached consensus that the Renamo demand “should be discussed in the framework
of national unity and the process of administrative decentralization, granting
more decision making powers to local state bodies, including financial
resources, and the decentralized form of election/appointment of Provincial
Government”.
This formulation sidesteps the issue of whether
provincial governors should be appointed or elected. Under the current
Constitution the President of the Republic appoints all the provincial
governors. Dhlakama, however, wants the right to appoint governors in those
provinces which he says were won by Renamo. The second opposition party, the
Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM – which is not represented at the current
talks) has insisted that the governors should be elected, and not appointed.
The two delegations agreed to set up a
sub-commission charged with drawing up the package of legislation to be
submitted to the Assembly. There are seven points in this package, the most
important of which is the constitutional amendment necessary to change the way
in which provincial governors (and other local state bodies) are appointed or
elected.
The sub-commission must amend the Law on Local
State Bodies and its regulations, the Law on Provincial Assemblies, and the Law
on the Organisation and Functioning of the Public Administration. New laws are
to be drafted on the bodies of the provincial governments, and on provincial
finances.
Finally, the sub-commission must “re-examine” the
1994 law on “municipal districts”. This law would have made each and every
district a municipality. It was never implemented, but was replaced by a
gradual approach to municipalisation. Thus initially only the 23 urban areas
with city status, plus ten towns (one in each province) were granted municipal
status, with directly elected mayors and municipal assemblies. Subsequently, 20
more towns have become municipalities, raising the total number of towns and
cities where municipal elections were held in 2013 to 53.
Reverting to the 1994 model of municipal districts
may prove difficult to reconcile with current municipal legislation, and would
certainly be extremely expensive.
Despite this proposed package of legislation,
Renamo still wants some way of ruling the six provinces it claims in the near
future, before those laws can take effect. Thus the consensual statement from
the Joint Commission declared “legal mechanisms should be found for the
provisional appointment of provincial governors from Renamo as quickly as
possible”.
Under the current constitution the only possible
legal mechanism would be for Renamo to submit names to Nyusi who would then
appoint them as governors.
Renamo has insistently claimed that it won the
2014 elections in the six central and northern provinces of Manica, Sofala,
Tete, Zambezia, Nampula and Niassa.
But this claim is untrue. Dhlakama topped the poll
in the presidential election in five provinces (Sofala, Zambezia, Manica, Tete
and Nampula), but Renamo only won a majority of votes in the parliamentary
elections in Sofala and Zambezia.
In the election for provincial assemblies, Renamo
won a majority in Sofala, Zambezia and Tete, while in Nampula both Renamo and
the ruling Frelimo Party won 46 seats. In Manica, Frelimo won one seat more
than Renamo.
As for Niassa, Frelimo (and Nyusi, who was then
its presidential candidate) won in all three elections.
The statement from the Commission said nothing at
all about any of the other points on the agenda – in particular, there is no
commitment from Renamo to halt military hostilities or to disarm its militia.
As for the proposed meeting between the team of
foreign mediators and Dhlakama, this too was not discussed, and no firm date
has yet been set for the mediators to visit Dhlakama at his military base in
the Sofala district of Gorongosa.
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