Mozambique: Conditions to maintain peace in 2025 – president

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Mozambique: Conditions to maintain peace in 2025 – president

8:29 CAT | 06 Jan 2025

Photo: First Lady Dr. Isaura Nyusi - Primeira-Dama Dra. Isaura Nyusi /Facebook

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi said on Sunday that there are conditions to “maintain peace” and reconciliation in 2025 after more than two months of post-election violence that has caused almost 300 deaths and a great deal of destruction.

“We are working towards this. I believe that the government will continue to work towards this. And there are conditions, but above all, there is capacity within Mozambicans to maintain peace,” said Filipe Nyusi, after visiting the Comunidade de Santo Egídio in Maputo, a Catholic organisation dedicated to charity and promoting peace.

In Mozambique, the Comunidade de Santo Egídio is notable for having mediated the general peace agreement signed in Rome in 1992 between Mozambique’s government, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) and the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (Renamo), which ended a 16-year civil war.

Following the announcement of the first results of the general elections on 9 October 2024, Mozambique was plunged into more than two months of consecutive stoppages and demonstrations, which degenerated into violence, called by presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane, who does not recognise those results.

“We have to find a way out,” Nyusi replied, but “without dramatising”, when asked by journalists as he left the community, saying that it was a day and a visit that was not about “playing politics” but about appreciating the work, starting with social reintegration, carried out by that institution.

Mozambique’s Constitutional Council (CC) has set 15 January for the inauguration of the new President of the Republic, who will succeed Filipe Nyusi.

On 23 December, the CC, the final court of appeal in electoral disputes, proclaimed Daniel Chapo, the candidate supported by the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo), as the winner of the election for President of the Republic, with 65.17% of the votes, succeeding Filipe Nyusi in office, as well as the victory of Frelimo, which retained its parliamentary majority, in the general elections on 9 October.

This announcement immediately led to new clashes, the destruction of public and private property, demonstrations, stoppages and looting. However, in the last week, with no new calls for protests, the situation has normalised throughout the country.

Daniel Chapo, touted by Frelimo as a “young proposal” and who will be the first head of state born after independence, will take over the Mozambican presidency in the year in which the country marks 50 years of independence, a period marked in the meantime by the greatest contestation of electoral results since the first elections in 1994.

His election is being contested in the streets. The CC’s announcement has added to the chaos that the country has been experiencing since October, with pro-Venâncio Mondlane demonstrators – a candidate who, according to the CC obtained only 24% of the votes but who claims victory – in protests demanding the “restoration of electoral truth, with barricades, looting and clashes with the police, who have been firing shots in an attempt to demobilise them.

Clashes between the police and protesters have led to almost 300 deaths and more than 500 people being shot, according to civil society organisations monitoring the process.

In addition to Venâncio Mondlane, supported by the Podemos party, in the run-up to Ponta Vermelha (the official residence of the President of the Republic), Chapo faced Ossufo Momade (who got 6.62%), leader and supported by the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), the main opposition force, and Lutero Simango (who got 4.02%), supported and president of the Democratic Movement of Mozambique, in the 9 October elections.

Mondlane, who is leading the protest from abroad, said in his Facebook posts that he will take office on 15 January and promised to announce in detail the next phase of the demonstrations, which he called “Ponta de Lança”.

Source: Lusa