Mozambique Elections: Muchanga claims Renamo victory in Matola - Watch
File photo / Fernando Faustino
Veterans of Mozambique’s national liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, unhappy at the current state of the ruling Frelimo Party, on Friday urged Frelimo to “wake up”.
The call came from Fernando Faustino, General Secretary of the Association of Veterans of the Liberation Struggle (ACLLN), at the opening in Maputo of an extraordinary meeting of the Frelimo Central Committee.
In easily the most electrifying moment of the morning’s proceedings, Faustino declared that nowadays Frelimo only comes to life on the eve of events such as elections and party congresses.
“Frelimo must wake up from its sleep and emerge from the situation of apparently only being alive when major events approach”, he demanded.
“It is obvious that Frelimo has become an electoral machine”, he said, “since for some Frelimo cadres politics means seeking positions in the government, in parliament, in the provincial or municipal assemblies, or seeking favouritism in business with the State”.
He claimed that many Frelimo members “feel ashamed” to wear T-shirts with the Frelimo symbols outside of electoral periods.
And the electoral machine was no longer working particularly well. There had been a time when Frelimo won elections “fairly easily”, said Faustino. But the results of the coming elections “are an unknown, particularly in the central and northern provinces”.
“Where are the four million members who are in the Frelimo statistics?”, he asked. This is a highly embarrassing question. For many years, the Frelimo leadership has claimed that the party has many millions of members, but the results of national elections do not support this claim.
In the 2014 parliamentary elections, Frelimo won 2.58 million votes, and in the presidential election 2.78 million votes. This is a far cry from the four million members claimed. It seems that Frelimo branches and committees have persistently exaggerated the number of members they have when reporting back to the party’s headquarters in Maputo.
Faustino claimed that many of Frelimo’s best cadres are being marginalised. There were many cadres available to work for the party, “but lots of them are now a long way from the political battlefield due to the weaknesses in our internal election system, where it is the smartest people who assault the ranks of the party, infiltrating and occupying prominent positions inside the Party bodies”
So the ACLLN wanted “a far-reaching re-organisation inside Frelimo. The purification of the ranks of our Party should be something real, genuine, opportune and merciless in order to give Frelimo back its dignity and value”.
He called for Frelimo to be strict about how it admits new members, and in electing party committees from the branch level up to the Central Committee. Screening members properly, he believed, “will bring back the trust that the people always deposited in Frelimo”.
“Our people are used to a Frelimo where its leaders speak openly and regularly with the people, where they learn from the people, hearing what they don’t like to hear, even hearing things which hurt, but always from the perspective of looking for solutions to the problems of our society”, said Faustino. The people did not want to see Frelimo “as an elite of great businessmen or of high ranking state officials, whom it is difficult to speak to, which seems to be the case today”.
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