/ 6 November 2009

All power to Frelimo

Mozambique's ruling party has taken more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament since 1975, writes Henrik Lomholt Rasmussen.

The newcomer will have to fight to survive, the old rival received a severe blow, and the ruling party gained absolute power. This is the outcome of last week’s elections in Mozambique, one of the world’s poorest and most corrupt countries.

With 90% of the votes counted, Frelimo will have 192 of 250 seats in the country’s Parliament. Renamo took 48, while the Renamo offspring, the Democratic Movement of Mozambique, has eight seats.

Based on this, Luís de Brito, a political analyst in Maputo, foresees a bleak future for democracy in Mozambique: ”The country now has a hegemonic party, like Namibia and Angola. Combined with Frelimo’s victory in nearly all the municipalities in last year’s local elections, the democratic space will decrease. Having more than two-thirds of the seats in the Parliament, Frelimo can change the Constitution unilaterally.”

He expected that Frelimo would use this to give President Armando Guebuza a third term, as there is no obvious successor to the 64-year-old leader. This did not mean that Guebuza was hugely popular. ”He lacks charisma. Even though he had 75% of the votes, the turnout was just 44%. The opposition failed to mobilise the 56% who didn’t vote.”

However, Maputo-based political scientist José Jaime Macuane said there had been a significant shift in Mozambique’s political landscape: ”For the first time we’ll have three parties in the Parliament — that’s positive for the Mozambican democracy.” But he foresaw a hard struggle for the eight-month-old MDM before the 2014 elections.

”MDM must focus on urban voters in bigger cities like Maputo and Beira,” he said. ”Tt can consolidate this base by concentrating on what can be seen as new values in Mozambican politics: demanding accountability, influencing decision-making and showing a willingness to [engage in] dialogue with the other parties.”

Macuane did not have high expectations of the newly elected provincial parliaments, saying that they would have ”no decisive power and will only act as implementing bodies”.

The MDM was excluded from nine of the 13 constituencies it sought to contest by the Mozambican election commission, CNE, which comprises members of Frelimo and Renamo.

The CNE claimed that the several MDM candidates did not meet requirements for registration, prompting the MDM to cry fraud, while international election observers, including those from the European Union and the Commonwealth, blamed the commission for lack of transparency.

De Brito said the CNE affair could hurt Mozambique’s international image.

With peace, stability and an annual growth of between 6% and 8% for more than 10 years, the donor community has used Mozambique as a showcase of how a war-torn developing country can be transformed. He was not surprised that Renamo and its presidential candidate, Afonso Dhlakama, had suffered their fourth consecutive electoral defeat.

”Renamo’s delegates are a bunch of parasites,” he said. ”For five years they have received public money without showing any interest in making a political contribution. This time the voters punished them.”

He expected Renamo to disband after running in the municipal and presidential elections in 2013 and 2014 respectively.

Dhlakama, who came close to beating Frelimo’s presidential candidate, Joaquim Chissano, in the 1999 elections, received just 15% of the vote on this occasion. He alleged fraud and has threatened an armed rebellion.

De Brito was sceptical: ”He has done this each [time he has lost an] election, which makes such actions less likely — but one can never know. The last thing Mozambique needs is instability.” He urged Frelimo to fight poverty, saying: ”The party ought to support small and medium-sized companies to create employment. Most of the country’s growth comes from large investments that only create a few local jobs.”

Henrik Lomholt Rasmussen is an information worker for the ­Danish Association for International Cooperation/Action Aid Mozambique