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PICS: AJUDEM offices ransacked – AIM report
6:58 CAT | 22 Aug 2018
Photos: Facebook Elídio Mavume
Unknown assailants ransacked the offices of the Youth Association for the Development of Mozambique (AJUDEM) in Maputo in the small hours of Wednesday morning.
AJUDEM has sprung to prominence over the past couple of weeks because it is contesting the 10 October municipal elections in Maputo, and its mayoral candidate is Samora Machel Junior (“Samito”), son of the country’s first president.
Interviewed by the independent television station STV, the AJUDEM election agent, Zefanias Langa, said the association had immediately called in the Criminal Investigation Service (SERNIC), who arrived promptly at the vandalised offices.
Langa said nothing of value was stolen, and the only things missing were cheques. He suspected that the thieves wanted to take the association’s official stamp – if so, they were out of luck, since the stamp is not kept in the office.
From the papers scattered around the floor, it seemed that the intruders may also have been looking for documents – but Langa said all the documents relevant to the municipal elections have already been delivered to the National Elections Commission (CNE).
The break-in follows public denunciations made by Langa and other AJUDEM members that some of their election candidates have received threats, including that they will lose their jobs in the public sector unless they abandon AJUDEM.
Meanwhile, AJUDEM’s hopes that its list will make it onto the ballot paper have been strengthened by an intervention by one of the country’s top jurists, Teodato Hungana, who is a former judge on the Constitutional Council, the highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law.
Four members of the AJUDEM list have asked for their names to be withdrawn, and Langa says that this is only because of the pressure they have faced. Until now, it was believed that, if the CNE allows these names to be withdrawn, the whole AJUDEM list will fall, since it will no longer have the required minimum of 67 names.
Hunguana, however, in an opinion piece that appeared on Wednesday in the online edition of the independent daily “O Pais”, argues that the law allows AJUDEM to replace the people whose names are removed from the list.
Hunguana said that, just as parties and groups can replace the heads of their lists (their mayoral candidates) who drop out, so they are entitled to replace other names on the list who, for whatever reason, resign.
He thought this was an “unquestionable prerogative” of parties or groups contesting elections. If this was not the case, “then an element of extreme insecurity and possibly of manipulation and bad faith would be introduced which the electoral law cannot permit”, he warned. Arguing otherwise, he said, “would be to legitimise all manner of electoral chicanery, presumably in order to eliminate competitors”.
In this case, Hunguana said, the CNE would have to give AJUDEM time to replace the four people who want to drop out of its list.
Hunguana also opposed the CNE’s decision to disqualify Venancio Mondlane from standing as the Maputo mayoral candidate of the main opposition party, Renamo.
The CNE voted on Sunday night to exclude Mondlane because he had resigned from the Maputo Municipal Assembly in 2014, when he was elected a deputy to the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic (at the time, he was a member of a different party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement, MDM). The law says that people who resign from municipal bodies cannot be elected to municipal office in the subsequent elections.
But the electoral law also states that nobody can be a parliamentary deputy and a member of a municipal body at the same time. This incompatibility means that somebody in Mondlane’s position had no choice but to give up his seat in the municipal assembly. Hunguana said this is automatic and does not depend on the deputies concerned writing letters of resignation.
“They do not need to do anything, since they automatically lose their seats in the municipal bodies once they become deputies”, he said. Formal letters of resignation are irrelevant, he added, since they lose their municipal seats by force of the law, and not because of any resignation.
The CNE, he said, “cannot now draw non-existent legal effects from irrelevant resignations”. Nobody should be punished just because they are elected to parliament – all that the law imposes in this case is that they cannot hold parliamentary and municipal office simultaneously.
Hunguana also accused the CNE of violating the Constitution when it treated Silverio Ronguane, the MDM candidate for mayor of Matola, differently from Venancio Mondlane, since both had done exactly the same thing – they had resigned seats in municipal assemblies in order to take up seats in parliament.
The CNE says it took no action against Ronguane, because nobody had complained about Ronguane, whereas the MDM had demanded the disqualification of Mondlane. Hunguana regarded this distinction as “absurd”, since it meant that the CNE was evading its legal duty to ensure “equality of treatment of citizens in all electoral acts”.
Instead it had damaged Mondlane and Renamo and shown favouritism towards Ronguane and the MDM.
Hunguana believed that the CNE’s mistakes “are endangering the freedom, justice and transparency of the elections”, but was optimistic that they will be corrected in appeals to the Constitutional Council.
Source: AIM
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