Venancio Mondlane appears on Renamo platform – AIM report

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Venancio Mondlane appears on Renamo platform – AIM report

8:19 CAT | 17 Jul 2018

Photo:TVM

Venancio Mondlane, formerly the rapporteur of the parliamentary group of the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), has appeared in Maputo at a rally of the country’s largest opposition party Renamo.

At the beginning of the month, it was announced that Mondlane had defected to Renamo after he sent a letter to the chairperson of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, Veronica Macamo, resigning his parliamentary seat.

Renamo’s General Secretary, Manuel Bissopo, presented Mondlane to the rally along with over a hundred supporters who had followed his lead. However, he refused to confirm that Mondlane will be the party’s candidate for mayor of the capital in the municipal elections on 10 October.

Speaking at the ceremony to welcome the new members and sympathisers, Bissopo said Renamo will announce the name of the head of the party’s list for Maputo in due course. He explained the nomination will come through a democratic process involving the party’s members.

Mondlane, who owes his entire political career to the MDM, shot to prominence in the 2013 municipal elections when he was MDM candidate for mayor of Maputo and took 40 per cent of the vote. This came as a shock to the ruling Frelimo Party, which had regarded Maputo as a stronghold. The Frelimo candidate, current mayor David Simango, won, but his vote was slashed from 85 to 58 per cent.

It had seemed that Mondlane would stand for the MDM again: MDM members in Maputo twice elected him as their candidate for mayor in the municipal elections – once at a meeting in October 2017, and again last month.

In October, Mondlane gave every impression of being an enthusiastic MDM candidate, hoping to improve on his 2013 result. But in June, Mondlane was not present at the meeting which endorsed him and issued a statement saying the MDM announcement “is false and it doesn’t come from me. It does not have my consent. It is null and void”.

Between October and June, Mondlane had fallen out with the MDM leader Daviz Simango, and at a meeting of the MDM National Council in April, he was not re-elected to the Party’s Political Commission. By then he was in discussions with Renamo, although he denied travelling to the central district of Gorongosa to meet with the then leader of Renamo, Afonso Dhlakama.

The MDM has been haemorrhaging members in recent months. Among the senior MDM figures refusing to stand on the MDM lists or threatening to leave the party, are parliamentary deputy Ricardo Tomas, who has refused nomination for mayor of Tete city, and Antonio Frangoulis, once a senior police officer, who defected from Frelimo to the MDM in 2014, who has promised to abandon the MDM because he considers it “undemocratic”. The mayor of Quelimane, Manuel de Araujo, has also threatened to leave the party.

Source: AIM