Maputo — The leader of the Union of Mozambican Democrats (UDM), Jose Viana, and his election agent, Aida Pires, are at each other's throats - but they agree on one thing: on 29 July, the closing date for nominations of candidates for next week's general elections, the UDM did not have a complete list of candidates for any of the 13 parliamentary constituencies.
The UDM lists were then cobbled together by Pires, on instructions from the National Elections Commission (CNE). By cannibalizing the incomplete lists that the UDM had delivered to the CNE it was possible to draw up a list for the central province of Sofala, and hence guarantee that this obscure party, which was only founded in January, would have a place on the Sofala ballot paper.
Viana was furious - not because of the peculiar procedures followed by the CNE, but because he had not been consulted. He has repeatedly denounced Pires for exceeding her powers, arguing that only the UDM leadership could shift candidates from one provincial list to another. He was not particularly interested in Sofala at all, but wanted the UDM to stand in his home province of Zambezia.
Viana appealed to the Constitutional Council, asking that body to sack Pires. It declined to do so, pointing out that the internal organisation of political parties has nothing to do with the Council.
In Wednesday's issue of the weekly paper "Magazine Independente" (MI), Pires struck back at Viana, calling him "demented".
"He's a phoney, he's a slanderer!", she exclaimed. "He should cure his own mind first, and only then can he cure other people".
But the key point in her interview with "MI" is that, as the UDM election agent, she recognised that in all the provinces, by 29 July, the party only had "eight to ten candidates". Although Pires seems unaware of the fact, this meant that all the UDM lists should have been rejected - which is what happened to several other minor parties who did not have enough candidates.
Instead the CNE gave her an hour to find enough candidates for a few provinces. So Pires sat down with a dozen other UDM members in a nearby restaurant, and pulled names off some provincial lists and put them onto others, in an attempt to provide full lists for Nampula, Sofala and Maputo City. So on the afternoon of 29 July, people who had consented to run for the UDM for one province were suddenly being transferred to other parts of the country without the slightest consultation.
Pires took her own name off the list for Inhambane province, so that she could head the Sofala list.
Even this last minute rearrangement was not good enough. The CNE notified Pires to "suppress irregularities" in the three lists, and the only one where she managed this was Sofala. "If we managed it in Sofala, it was because there was only one person missing, and we arranged this person", she said.
Arranged this person? A person who was originally missing from the list? In justifying its exclusion of extra-parliamentary parties, the CNE has repeatedly said that if lists did not contain enough candidates, then they could not be accepted. No new names could be added after 29 July.
The CNE notified parties of "procedural irregularities" in their paperwork (such as a candidate without his criminal record certificate, or a photocopy of an identity card that had not been recognised by a notary). Parties could correct such irregularities within five days of notification. But a candidate with no file of documents was not regarded as a candidate at all, but simply as a name on a sheet of paper.
Even the avuncular advice given to Pires on 29 July to sort the lists out and come back in an hour seems highly irregular - if only because similar "understanding" was not shown to other parties.
The largest extra-parliamentary force, the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), also delivered its nomination papers on 29 July. In September, the CNE announced that the MDM had been excluded from nine constituencies because it did not have enough valid candidates.
But if the CNE could detect the UDM's problem on 29 July and tell it to transfer candidates from one province to another, why did it not adopt the same procedure with the MDM?
The squabble between Viana and Pires seems beyond repair, and she suggested to MI that it would end up in the courts.
"When I began to work with him in Inhambane, I didn't know he was like this", she said. "I thought he was a normal person".
Viana, who once boasted of his loyalty to the ruling Frelimo Party, now claims that Frelimo "has a pact with the devil". The UDM's one distinctive policy is its call for an end to the separation of church and state. Viana has repeatedly declared that Mozambique should be ruled "by the divine law".
Source: Allafrica
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