In an interview published in Monday’s issue of the independent newsheet “Mediafax”, Dhlakama declared “validating the results when everybody knows there was fraud is an offence to the public and to the political parties. It is to procure violence and disobedience”.
The Council will give its verdict on the elections on Tuesday morning. The results, as announced by the National Elections Commission (CNE), showed a victory for the ruling Frelimo Party and its presidential candidate, Filipe Nyusi, although with a much lower share of the vote than Frelimo had achieved in the previous elections, in 2009, when it won 75 per cent.
This time Nyusi took 57 per cent of the vote to 36.6 per cent for Dhlakama. In the parliamentary election, Frelimo lost 47 seats, but retained an overall majority. On the CNE’s figures, Frelimo will have 144 seats in the new parliament, Renamo 89 and the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) 17.
Although Dhlakama more than doubled his share of the presidential vote, he has repeatedly denounced the elections as a gigantic fraud. He has called for a “caretaker government” (which would be a form of Frelimo-Renamo coalition) to run the country for the next five years. He has threatened that, if Frelimo rejects this demand (and Frelimo leaders have repeatedly dismissed the idea), then he will form his own government.
Dhlakama claimed that the Constitutional Council “has discovered the fraud”, and urged it to annul the elections.
The Council, he said, “has an opportunity to be impartial and to have the political courage to indicate the problems and invalidate the elections without complying with orders from the government or the Frelimo Central Committee”.
He claimed that “Renamo will not accept” validation of the results, and warned “the time for this playing about is over”.
Dhlakama added that Renamo wants “to avoid confusion and war. That is why we are calling on the judges of the Constitutional Council to show common sense”.
Thus for Dhlakama “common sense” and “impartiality” mean siding with Renamo, and “confusion and war” can only be avoided by meeting Renamo demands.
Although Dhlakama claims “everybody knows” the elections were fraudulent, this is not what Renamo said on election day itself. During the elections Renamo had 26,761 monitors at the 17,010 polling stations – yet only a handful of them reported any fraud or irregularities.
The kits for each and every polling station contained printed sheets where monitors were entitled to write down any complaints or protests. These went unused. Not a single monitor filed a protest at any of the polling stations. According to CNE spokesperson Paulo Cuinica, not a single written protest from any polling station reached the CNE.
The competing political parties were entitled to appeal to district courts against any abuses they observed at the polling stations. If the fraud was on the scale claimed by Dhlakama, one might have expected hundreds, if not thousands, of appeals to the district courts – particularly as it was on Renamo’s insistence that this avenue of appeal was included in the electoral legislation.
In fact, just 24 cases were submitted to the district courts in the entire country, and several of these came from Frelimo and the MDM. According to Pedro Nhatitima, spokesperson for the Supreme Court, all the Renamo appeals were rejected by the district courts because Renamo presented no evidence, or because the appeals were lodged beyond the 48 hour deadline established by the electoral law.
Dhlakama also told “Mediafax” that his demand for a caretaker government respects the Constitution – although there is no mention of such a form of government anywhere in the constitutional text.
He claimed “even the radicals in Frelimo support a caretaker government as a solution for the current political scenario”. AIM is not aware of anybody in Frelimo, radical or otherwise, who has expressed any support for Dhlakama’s proposal.
Post published in: Africa News