Abstract
The coalition had backed the popular independent candidate Venancio Mondlane, who is now the main challenger to the ruling Frelimo party. By issuing the ban, the government has effectively ensured that the one independent candidate who might challenge the ruling party will lack the resources and infrastructure to run a professional political campaign.
Mondlane is one of four presidential candidates approved by the Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law. He is up against Daniel Chapo from Frelimo; Ossufo Momade from Renamo (up until now the main opposition party); and Lutero Simango, from the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM).
Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi (L), also the party chief of the ruling party Frelimo, congratulates Daniel Franciso Chapo for becoming Frelimo’s candidate in the presidential election in October
Mondlane is seen by many in Mozambique as the only person who can beat Chapo, who is representing the party of outgoing president Felipe Nyusi. Frelimo has been governing the country since independence from Portugal in 1975.
This is the second time Mondlane has been stripped of support. He was once a senior figure in Renamo and wanted to be its presidential candidate, but he was stopped from challenging current leader Momade during the party’s congress in May.
A charismatic leader - riding on promises to deliver an honest, transparent and reformist government that will remove Mozambique from the list of the poorest countries in the world - Mondlame appeals to young people in particular.
Two thirds of the country’s population of 33 million are under 25 and these increasingly highly-educated Gen Z-ers are threatening the establishment.
In an interview with Index, human rights defender Adriano Nuvunga, from Maputo’s Centre for Democracy and Development, said the barring of CAD was a concerning development.
“Mozambique elections are highly exclusionary,” he said. “Frelimo keeps power by excluding candidates, excluding political parties.
“Once you have an electoral system and electoral management that excludes candidates and excludes political parties from contesting elections, clearly you do not have a level playing field for electoral competition. It’s restricted. Government only allows those competitors that do not represent a significant challenge to the incumbent.”
Nuvunga said it was all part of an “opaque, non-transparent and fraudulent electoral system that is meant to perpetuate the status quo in the country”.
The October election comes amid a long-running unresolved conflict between the government and a radical Islamist group in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique, which has been going on since 2017.
One of the important tasks facing the next president will be to come up with new strategies to restore security there as Nyusi’s route of relying simply on a military response has failed to yield results.
He has rejected dialogue with insurgents and failed to address factors that have made the province a fertile recruitment ground for the terror group. A strategy to contain extremism that was crafted with support from the World Bank and the European Union, which identified poverty and social inequality as drivers of radicalisation, has not been acted on by the president, who has also failed to come up with development policies.
Tomás Queface, an analyst at Cabo Ligado Observatory, told Index that the fact that Frelimo had chosen a young presidential candidate - Chapo is 47, and would be the first president born after the country’s independence in 1975 - did not mean that change was on the horizon and Chapo would just continue Nyusi’s policies.
On the other hand, he added that Mondlane had shown that he was not someone who blindly followed the directives of his party but who thought independently. More importantly, he has shared his manifesto which, instead of just making promises, proposes reforms to electoral law and changes to the management of natural resources and other sectors which would return more power to ordinary people.
He added that the majority of Mozambique’s population had lost trust in the election process because of fraud and irregularities. During the last election, he claimed, the results from polling stations in Maputo were changed - either by the electoral commission or the Constitutional Council.
Responding to the rigging allegations, in his state of the nation address in December, Nyusi said they were just “isolated irregularities”.
He added that “in no country in the world is democracy perfect”.
However, Queface said there were many more problems in the country.
“Because the rate of unemployment is very high, the cost of living is unaffordable for the majority [and] public servant sectors are on strike because of poor working and salary conditions,” he said. “Young people have no hope because they have to bribe people for the few jobs available. After 49 years of independence, Mozambique remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Politicians are very detached from reality. People want an alternative to Frelimo.”
He also said that Cabo Delgado was an enormous election issue and that the government had failed to guarantee the safety of people there, instead making a huge effort to close the province to journalists and researchers.
Terrorist groups have been committing acts of barbarity there, including beheadings, forced disappearances and kidnappings.
Queface said several journalists had been threatened, arrested and killed by Mozambican security forces for reporting on the conflict.
“The province represents a risk zone for journalists and researchers,” he said. “Ibrahimo Abu Mbaruco, a journalist who was based in the district of Palma, was allegedly kidnapped in 2020 by the military and his whereabouts are still unknown. Amade Abubacar, a journalist based in Macomia, was arrested by the authorities - allegedly for collaborating with terrorists, something that has never been proven.”
Camp for displaced people in Cabo Delgado in northern Mozambique
CREDIT: (Nyusi & Chapo) Constancio Sitoe/Xinhua/Alamy; MAXPPP/Alamy
Khanyo Farise, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for East and Southern Africa, backed Queface’s claims.
“Authorities have so far failed to investigate the killing of newspaper editor Joao Fernando Chamusse and the enforced disappearance of Mbaruco in the Cabo Delgado region,” he said.
Social activist and human rights defender Abudo Gafuro Manana told Index that elections have a history of worsening human rights violations in his country, in particular around issues such as the conflict in Cabo Delgado, with research on such issues violently prohibited.
“People are not free to speak. There is a lot of censorship at all levels,” he said. “I have already received three threats for talking about the Cabo Delgado conflict.
“I have opened two cases with the prosecutor’s office [but] I have never received a response to the threats I received.
“Freedom of expression is far from being a constitutional right for Mozambicans in general - and especially here in Cabo Delgado.”
In June, the International Republican Institute (IRI) convened a private roundtable discussion on Mozambique, focusing on the elections and how the US government could support the country diplomatically and through programmes including a 10-year strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability.
The participants called for international actors to amplify what citizen observers, civil society, journalists and others on the ground are doing and to identify and engage influential stakeholders who have the capacity to choose violence or non-violence and escalation or de-escalation.
International pressure can help. Farise said that after Amnesty International published a report into the conflict highlighting war crimes that the mercenary Dyck Advisory Group allegedly committed on behalf of the state, the group was sent back to South Africa.
“That is a measure of accountability, though not the legal process we would prefer.”