Frelimo deputies accuse MDM of murdering Nampula mayor – AIM report

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Frelimo deputies accuse MDM of murdering Nampula mayor – AIM report

8:26 CAT | 01 Nov 2017

Two parliamentary deputies of Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo party on Wednesday publicly accused the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) of organising the murder, on 4 October, of Mahamudo Amurane, mayor of the northern city of Nampula.

Amurane had been elected in the municipal elections of 2013 on the MDM ticket, but he had fallen out with the MDM leadership. This year there were bitter exchanges and insults between Amurane and the MDM. Although Amurane never resigned from the MDM, he repeatedly promised that he would run for a second term of office, but not as an MDM candidate.

In a question and answer session with the government, the MDM parliamentary group asked for explanations about unsolved murders going back many years, and included the death of Amurane. Given the known conflict between Amurane and the MDM leadership, Frelimo deputies regarded this as hypocritical.

Cemilde Muchanga accused the MDM of “trying to deceive public opinion. Don’t come here to manipulate us. The people of Nampula know who is responsible for the crime”.

The latest developments, she said, referring to the attempt to sack councillors loyal to the late mayor, “leave no doubt that greed for power and greed for municipal funds were the motives for the murder”.

“It’s shameful that you come here with crocodile tears”, she told the MDM deputies. “You tried to take the municipality by force from Amurane a day earlier, then you resorted to your Plan B”. (She was referring to a story, denied by the MDM, that MDM members had tried to evict Amurane from his office and seize the keys).

Patricio Mpangai went further and told the MDM “many of the assassinations that take place in Mozambique are your work”.

“They boasted before the murder that they would remove Amurane”, he said, adding that the Nampula public “know who killed him”, and so refused to allow MDM leader Daviz Simango to attend the funeral (a claim which the MDM also denies).

When AIM asked the spokesperson for the Frelimo parliamentary group, Edmundo Galiza-Matos Junior, whether the statements by Muchanga and Mpangai reflected official Frelimo policy, he said they did not and that the two deputies were merely expressing their personal opinions.

MDM deputy Fernando Bismarque told AIM the two deputies were taking advantage of the well-known disagreements between Amurane and his party to smear the MDM. The claim that the MDM had tried to take his keys from Amurane was just a mobile phone text message that had circulated following the murder and had no basis in fact, he said.

As the debate continued, tempers shortened and the MDM hurled accusations at Frelimo. Thus Jose Manuel de Sousa claimed that the founder of Frelimo, Eduardo Mondlane, was murdered in the liberated areas of northern Mozambique by people loyal to his successor Samora Machel. In fact, Mondlane died in Dar es Salaam when he opened a parcel bomb, generally believed to have been sent by the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE.

Another wild claim by Sousa was that Josina Machel, Samora’s wife, had been murdered, while in reality she had died of illness in a Tanzanian hospital in 1971.

The MDM’s list of unsolved murders was a shoddy affair, since it included the assassination of investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso. MDM deputy Jose Lobo tried to correct this in his speech, admitting that Cardoso’s murderers were arrested, tried and sentenced. But he claimed this was only because of “foreign pressure” on the government. Lobo thus insulted all Cardoso’s Mozambican friends and colleagues, and a vast range of Mozambican civil society organisations who had campaigned tirelessly to ensure that the case would come to trial.

Justice Minister Isaque Chande told the Assembly that investigators have questioned 34 people about the Amurane murder, and there are six suspects (whom he did not name).

As for another name on the MDM’s list, Maputo prosecutor Marcelino Vilanculos, murdered in April 2016, Chande pointed that the trial of one of those accused of the assassination is now under way before the Maputo Provincial Court in Matola.

Source: AIM