As Mozambique heads to the polls on Wednesday, the country’s ruling party looks set for an easy victory over an opposition that has been battered by a recent split and bruised by a series of election losses.
Mozambique’s main opposition party Renamo and its breakaway rival, the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM), look likely to divide the Southern African country’s already small opposition vote on Wednesday — handing Frelimo, the party that has governed Mozambique since independence in 1975, a runaway win.
Incumbent President Armando Guebuza is a favorite to win re-election against Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama, a fourth-time presidential hopeful, and youthful MDM founder Daviz Simango.
”You’re in a transition,” said Joseph Hanlon, editor of the Mozambique Political Process Bulletin.
”Dhlakama has again failed to organise, so [Renamo] will not do well … MDM is new, it is still seen as a Renamo split. I think Frelimo’s worry is not about MDM this year, but about MDM in five years,” Hanlon told Agence France-Presse.
In the 15 years since the introduction of multi-party democracy in Mozambique, Renamo has been the country’s main opposition party yet never gained a foothold at the polls.
The former rebel group fought a 16-year civil war to force one-time liberation army Frelimo to abandon Communism and embrace multi-party democracy.
But even after signing a 1992 peace agreement that paved the way for democratic elections, Renamo struggled to overcome its image as a guerrilla army that fought a war of destabilisation with the help of white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and apartheid South Africa.
While Mozambique has grown under Frelimo — the economy averaged 8% growth a year for a decade following the war — it remains one of the world’s poorest countries, with 90% of its people living on less than two dollars a day.
Yet Renamo never managed to convert frustration with poverty into a parliamentary majority or presidency.
In the last general elections in 2004, its coalition took just 30% of the vote. Dhlakama lost the presidential race 64% to 32%.
Political analysts say Dhlakama never succeeded in turning Renamo from a military organisation into a political party.
”Renamo didn’t manage to adapt itself to the new context of democratic electoral competition, which demands another kind of approach, another kind of internal organization,” said Jose Jaime Macuane, a political scientist at Eduardo Mondlane University.
Hanlon said Dhlakama had insisted on maintaining ”very centralised control over the party”.
Simango’s break with Renamo came just before local elections last November, when party leaders refused to nominate him to stand for re-election as mayor of Beira.
Simango, who won praise in his first term in office for cleaning up Mozambique’s second-largest city, ran on an independent ticket and won with 62% of the vote.
The victory made him Mozambique’s only non-Frelimo mayor and gave him the momentum to found the MDM in March, taking several prominent Renamo members with him.
”What makes Simango interesting, and what makes Simango worrying for Frelimo, is he’s starting from a very different place,” Hanlon said.
”He’s not starting from being an old guerrilla leader, he’s starting from being a politician who’s organising a party and having been successful mayor in Beira.”
But, Hanlon added, ”Simango will only succeed in the long term if he can take votes away from Frelimo.”
Eduardo Eloy da Silva, a member of the MDM’s national committee, said he is confident his party offers voters something neither Frelimo nor Renamo can in this country still recovering from its long years of war.
”This is a political force that was born out of a non-military movement,” he said.
”That’s why the MDM is going to capture a large part of Mozambican civil society that wasn’t voting for either Frelimo or Renamo.” — AFP
