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Crises in Mozambique discrediting Frelimo – academic
6:14 CAT | 21 Jun 2016
Lusa
The Mozambican political scientist João Pereira said on Saturday that the crises that Mozambique was experiencing were badly discrediting Frelimo, and that the party in power for more than 40 years has proved itself unable to provide solutions to the Mozambican people’s problems.
“All these situations badly discredit Frelimo [Liberation Front of Mozambique],” the professor of political science at Eduardo Mondlane University told Lusa at the demonstration against the country’s political crisis and the economic situation in Maputo on Saturday.
Pereira said the values for which the Frelimo had fought were forgotten and that recently the party led by Filipe Nyusi had gone from a political organisation that responded to the needs of its people to a simple electoral machine.
If it was unable to meet the basic needs of its people or make political reforms in response to the dynamics of the new situation, Frelimo risked losing the next election.
“If the economic crisis increases, there’s no doubt the probability of Frelimo winning is very small,” the academic said, warning that levels of electoral abstention in the last elections betrayed a high degree of disaffection with politics among Mozambicans.
Skeptical about the results of the negotiations recently re-established between the government and the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), Pereira believes that the process to end the political and military crisis will be lengthy, and that unless the parties restore confidence, Afonso Dhlakama will never come out of the bush to negotiate with President Nyusi.
“I do not know if these committees will be able to reach agreement to facilitate Dhlakama’s movement,” he said, pointing to the Renamo requirement of governing the six provinces where claims victory in the 2014 elections and the incorporation of Dhlakama’s colleagues into the police and army as aspects that will potentially create more disagreements in the negotiation process.
“We will still have a very difficult time,” he said, adding that he thought the situation would deteriorate in the near future despite the leaders of both parties having recently expressed their desire to end the political crisis in Mozambique.
On Thursday, the Mozambican president said he would accept the presence of mediators in negotiations between the government and Renamo, and indicating an immediate end to the fighting as a priority.
The leader of the main opposition party Mozambican said on Friday that he had reached consensus on peace with the head of the Mozambican state, Filipe Nyusi, by telephone, but that the end of armed conflicts depended on security guarantees.
Source: Lusa
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