Dhlakama again threatens to take power

Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama

According to the latest issue of the weekly “Magazine Independente” (MI), Dhlakama made this threat at a meeting with young supporters somewhere in the central province of Sofala, on 30 November.

MI obtained a recording of Dhlakama’s speech, which lasted for seven minutes and 37 seconds. The paper’s director. Lourenco Jossias, assured AIM on Wednesday that the tape is genuine and that he recognized Dhlakama’s voice.

Dhlakama had not been seen in public since 9 October, when he consented to the police disarming his bodyguards at his house in Beira, He told his audience that he is in good health and claimed that he had only been silent for the past two months because he was preparing strategies “to oblige the Frelimo regime to fall once and for all”.

He guaranteed that, as from next year, he will govern the central and northern provinces and will “if necessary, take Maputo”.

“We shall take over without bloodshed”, he declared, but added “if they want to send tanks and armoured cars to react, then Renamo will destroy everything

“We don’t want war, but if they come and attack us, they shall receive a beating”, he said.

He claimed that the ruling Frelimo Party “is a small party which almost doesn’t exist. It’s a party of soldiers, of policemen, of thieves, of traitors, of assassins, of a group based in Maputo which is nothing”.

The mention of “traitors” is historically inept, given Renamo’s record as a willing tool of the white minority regimes of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and of apartheid South African in their wars of destabilization against Mozambique.

Dhlakama urged the Renamo youth to follow in his footsteps, declaring “I don’t want to be the only Afonso Dhlakama. I want thousands of Afonso Dhlakamas”.

When the time came for him to rest, he added, it would be the Renamo youths who would replace him at the helm of the party.

There is nothing new about Dhlakama’s threats, but his time scale has slipped. He used to talk of grabbing power in the northern and central province he wants by mid-2015, but proved quite incapable of putting such menacing words into practice.