Mozambique: Frelimo ‘will find presidential candidate who meets expectations’

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Mozambique: Frelimo ‘will find presidential candidate who meets expectations’

5:50 CAT | 02 Mar 2021

File photo: Folha de Maputo

The secretary-general of Mozambique’s governing party, Frelimo, said on Monday that it would nominate a candidate for president of the country who meets the expectations of the people, stressing that it “will know how to deal” with the succession to the incumbent, Filipe Nyusi.

“We will organise ourselves so as not to disappoint the entire Mozambican population,” the Frelimo secretary-general. Roque Silva, said in an interview with public broadcaster Radio Mozambique.

He was responding to a question about whether the debate about the succession to the current head of state and Frelimo leader – who is serving his second term as president and is constitutionally barred from standing for a third – has already begun, more than three years to go before the election.

Silva stressed that Frelimo had a broad base of choices of presidential candidates.

“Fortunately, Frelimo has a wealth of members, a broad base, and will know how to deal with that,” he said.

The party would, he said open up a debate in good time on who is to succeed Nyusi, but for now it is focussed on implementing the five-year programme of the government he heads, and which translates the manifesto with which he and the party won the 2019 general elections.

“At this moment, our greatest concentration is the fulfillment of the electoral manifesto, which has been transformed into the Government’s Five-Year Programme,” he stressed.

Nyusi ends his second and final presidential term in 2024 and, under the country’s constitution, cannot stand again.

Frelimo has governed Mozambique for 45 years, ever since the country gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, and has won all six general elections held since the introduction of a multi-party system under the 1990 constitution.

Source: Lusa