Mozambique: Frelimo machinery seized by group with its own agenda, accuses Graça Machel - AIM ...
The deadline for the Government and Renamo to agree a plan for decentralisation has passed. Mediators say the proposal could be sent to Parliament in December. The Bar Asociation favours a constitutional revision.
The deadline for the joint commission of the Mozambican Government and the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) to agree on a legislative package for the country’s administrative decentralisation, as a response to the main opposition’s party demand to govern in the six provinces where it won the last elections ended yesterday (November 30), has passed.
On the final day for the presentation of the proposal, everything remained open regarding the new version of the document incorporating both sides’ responses to the original proposal presented to the Government and Renamo delegations at the beginning of this phase of the dialogue.
Both parties are debating a specific revision of the Constitution and the Bar Association argues that this should be Parliament’s priority. However, the president of the Constitutional Court has already issued the warning that constitutional reviews are not magic solutions to the country’s problems.
Decentralisation proposal in December?
According to the Mozambican Information Agency (AIM), coordinator of the political dialogue mediation team, Mario Raffaelli, said after a meeting between the members of the mediation team this Tuesday (November 29) that the proposal for decentralisation could be sent to the Assembly of the Republic in December.
“The month of November is an indicative date. There are no problems if the document arrives three days late. We will do everything to send,” said Raffaelli, cited by AIM.
According to Raffaelli, the coordinators’ group has not yet harmonised the counter-proposals made separately by the Government and Renamo delegations.
Lawyers want a revision
The Mozambican Bar Association wants to review Mozambique’s constitution and questions whether Mozambican society’s aspirations are the same now as they were in 2004, when the last revision of the country’s constitution was carried out.
The association says reflection on aspects related to the powers of the head of state and the cohabitation between the one-party and multi-party model, among other points, is required.
“In the single-party model, the president of a party is also president of the Republic. Does this model still make sense in the 21st century?” Felipe Filipe Sitoe, spokesman for the recent Bar Association Congress of Justice, asks.
The doubts multiply. “Do forms of governance, forms of decentralisation, nationality issues, land ownership issues have to be dealt with as they were dealt with in the 1990 and 2004 constitutions?” Sitoe asks.
Justice Minister Isac Chande encourages the Bar Association to hold discussions on constitutional review and other pressing issues. Chande believes that their “valuable contributions … could be sent to the Assembly of the Republic, to enrich the internal debates”.
A Revision is not a magical solution
Former justice minister and President of the Constitutional Court Rui Baltazar warns, however, against seeing constitutional reviews as a magic solution to specific political, economic and social problems, saying that the solution to these problems should be sought elsewhere and through more appropriate mechanisms than amendments to the Constitution.
The former minister stressed that the reconciliation of Mozambicans is a matter of conscience and not of law. “Do not fall, then, into the easy illusion that by changing the Constitution we will normalise and reconcile Mozambican society,” he stressed.
The Bar Association, for its part, argues that the revision of the Constitution should be a priority for the deputies, since the question “has already lasted a long time and the results are not very palpable,” Sitoe says. “We think it should be much more dynamic and more prioritised.”
A revision of the constitution is being debated between the Government and Renamo in the context of the political dialogue aimed at ending the political-military conflict in the country.
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