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DW (File photo) / When a mayor dies, or resigns, or is otherwise unable to continue his duties, the Chairperson of the Municipal Assembly becomes interim mayor as is the case with Manuel Tocova
The Attorney’s Office in the northern Mozambican province of Nampula has intervened to prevent the dismissal or appointment of councillors in Nampula Municipal Council, following the murder of the Mayor, Mahamudo Amurane, on 4 October, according to a report on Mozambique Television (TVM).
When a mayor dies, or resigns, or is otherwise unable to continue his duties, the Chairperson of the Municipal Assembly becomes interim mayor. In Nampula, the chairperson of the Assembly, Manuel Tocova, on Thursday attempted to make sweeping changes in the council.
He sacked nine of the councillors who had served Amurane, and replaced them with people of his choice, many of them members of his own political party, the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM). Some of them had been sacked by Amurane, for alleged acts of corruption.
Tocova had no power to make these changes, since he has not even been sworn in yet as interim mayor.
But more fundamentally, the powers of an interim mayor depend on whether or not there will be a by-election for mayor, and in the case of Nampula, this is not yet clear.
The Nampula Attorney’s office pointed out that there are two regimes – the interim mayor can make significant changes if there will be no by-election, and he can expect to be in office for many months.
But if a by-election is held, then the interim mayor’s power is limited to running the day-to-day affairs of the Municipal Council and he can make no far-reaching changes.
Last week the Municipal Assembly complied with the formality of informing the central government that the position of mayor is vacant, because of Amurane’s death. The government must now decided whether and when to hold a by-election.
The law seems clear. The government has thirty days from the declaration of the mayor’s death to set the date for a by-election, and a by-election must be held if the mayor dies with a year or more of his term of office still to serve.
An inconvenient by-election?
Although Amurane was elected mayor on 1 December 2013, he did not take office until February 2014 – and his term of office is counted from that date, not the date of the election. So his term of office still had another 15 months to run, and legally a by-election must be held.
Such a by-election may well be inconvenient for all the political parties who are already planning to contest the municipal elections scheduled for October 2018. It will mean holding a mayoral election in Nampula twice in the space of less than a year.
Asked about the possibility of a Nampula by-election, the chairperson of the National Elections Commission (CNE), Abdul Carimo, said that the CNE, and its executive body, the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE), are perfectly capable of organising the by-election at short notice.
Also Read: Also Read: Will Nampula vote for a new Mayor in by-election? Government to decide within 30 days
Tocova is also reported to have drafted in staff from Beira City Council, which is also run by the MDM, to hold an audit of the Nampula municipal accounts. If true, this would also be beyond his powers, especially as he has not even taken the oath of office yet.
Tocova and Amurane were known to be in serious disagreement. Both were members of the MDM, but a wide gulf had opened between Amurane and the rest of the MDM leadership. Amurane never actually resigned from the MDM, but he did declare repeatedly that he intended to run for a second term of office, but not as an MDM candidate.
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