The leader of Podemos, the Mozambican party supporting the presidential candidacy of Venâncio Mondlane, said on Tuesday that the priority remains “electoral truth” and that the perpetrators of the “fraud” in October’s general elections must be “held accountable”.
“We pay a lot of money to those who are in the institutions that are supposed to look after this process. There are children who don’t have food because we paid money for these elections, if it’s to annul them, then we have to seriously hold the people who committed this accountable. Otherwise we’ll be committing fraud on ourselves,” said the president of the Optimist Party for the Development of Mozambique (Podemos).
Albino Forquilha took this position when he spoke in Maputo at a round table to discuss ways of “promoting peace in the context of post-election tension”, promoted by the non-governmental organisation Sala da Paz, following the general elections on 9 October, the results of which were announced and triggered widespread protests for more than 40 days.
According to the results of the general elections on 9 October, announced by the National Electoral Commission (CNE) and which still have to be validated by the Constitutional Council (CC), Podemos, a party that until now has been non-parliamentary and which gained prominence by supporting Venâncio Mondlane’s presidential candidacy, will become the largest opposition party, with 31 MPs out of 250 mandates.
However, the entire opposition does not recognise the CNE’s results, which gave victory to the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo, in power since 1975) – 195 MPs and the election of Daniel Chapo as country’s president – and is demanding a recount of the votes and even the annulment of the vote, alleging ‘electoral fraud’.
“We have to know who is actually planning, organising and operating the electoral fraud. If we don’t know this person well, then we’ll get someone else to solve a problem they don’t know about. We have Frelimo, we have partisan institutions that are there not to comply with our Constitution and other laws, but to comply with the party’s command,” he accused, guaranteeing: “The CC will be forced to bring in electoral justice.”
Regarding the CC, which has already declared that the results of the general elections will be announced around 23 December, Forquilha says that it must “call in” those who “were on the ground” to analyse the process, such as representatives of the competing political parties, observers and journalists, checking minutes and notices together.
The leader of Podemos says that the priority should be “electoral justice”: “The fundamental problem is the denial of democracy. The fundamental problem is the electoral fraud that has taken place”.
“That’s why our party has looked for evidence, and taken evidence, some 500 types of evidence. It’s evidence produced by credible institutions in our country. We want this electoral truth to be made with a clear confrontation of this evidence with the evidence that they made with the figures that were released by the CNE,” he pointed out, refusing as a first solution to annul the elections.
The leader argued that only in the event of an ‘impasse’ should ‘other solutions’ be sought, such as through ‘dialogue’.
“If we reach a point where, due to clear evidence, duly presented in a transparent manner, there is an impasse and we can’t achieve electoral truth,” he said, claiming that these “dialogue mechanisms” must obey “clear principles” that have been defined in advance.
At least 76 people died and another 240 were wounded by gunfire in Mozambique in 41 days of disputes over the election results, essentially called by candidate Venâncio Mondlane, according to the Mozambican non-governmental organisation Plataforma Eleitoral Decide.
Presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane has called for a new phase of electoral contestation lasting a week, starting on Wednesday, in ‘all neighbourhoods’ of Mozambique, with motor traffic paralysed.
Lusa
