BEIRA MUNICIPALITY

SIMANGO INDEPENDENT CANDIDATURE TO GO AHEAD

Maputo, 3 Sept (AIM) – The “Renamo Management Commission” which has taken control of Mozambique’s main opposition party in the central city of Beira has confirmed that on Tuesday it did indeed send a letter to the party’s general secretary, Ossufo Momad, demanding the reinstatement of the Mayor of Beira, Daviz Simango, as the party’s Beira candidate in the local elections scheduled for 19 November.
Last Thursday, the Renamo leadership performed a sudden volte-face and declared it was no longer backing Simango. Instead veteran Renamo parliamentarian Manuel Pereira would be the party’s candidate for mayor of Beira, allegedly at the demand of “the grass roots” – although Pereira himself confirmed that he had been nominated by Renamo president Afonso Dhlakama.
But when the Renamo “grass roots” poured onto the streets of Beira, it turned out that they were backing Simango. The Renamo Sofala provincial and Beira city delegates, Fernando Mbararano and Faque Inacio, went into hiding, and Simango supporters took over the party’s offices, where they set up the “Renamo Management Commission”.
According to a report in the independent newsheet “Mediafax”, the Management Commission says it sent the letter to Momad at around 14.30 on Tuesday, with the warning that if they did not receive a satisfactory answer by Wednesday they would run Simango as an independent candidate.

The commission’s spokesperson, Chico Jose, said the Commission has already collected 4,000 signatures of registered Beira voters in support of Simango. On Wednesday the number could reach 5,000 – more than twice as much as the legally required figure of 2,300 (one per cent of the registered electorate).
But Momad told “Mediafax” that by the time he left his office on Tuesday, he had not received any letter from Beira. He dismissed the “Management Commission” on the grounds that it has “no legal existence”, as if he expected the law to resolve internal disputes in political parties.
Meanwhile the Commission is preparing what it describes as a “mega-demonstration” in support of Simango. They took care to notify the authorities in good time, and the police have authorized the demonstration.
Simango himself has now broken his silence. In an interview with the weekly paper “Magazine Independente” (MI), said he would accept the requests to stand as an independent. Those requests came from the public, from neighbourhood secretaries, from Renamo members and delegates and even from some members of the ruling Frelimo Party (though Frelimo, of course, would clearly benefit from a split in the Renamo vote).
Simango said “I was the victim of a small group of greedy and ambitious people, who want to loot the funds of Beira municipality for personal purposes. They are people who have a deficit of democratic culture and of good government management”.
He said he had been surprised at the news that he was no longer the candidate, but asked the people of Beira to remain calm, because the battle was not lost. “I’m leaving everything to the criterion of the public, because unity makes us strong”, he said.
MI also gives details of the turbulent scenes that followed the press conference given in Beira on Thursday by Mbararano to announce that Renamo was jettisoning Simango, supposedly because Pereira had been “chosen by consensus by the grass roots” as the candidate. But there had been no consultation and no inner party election, and the immediate result of Mbararano’s statements was that an angry crowd of Simango supporters invaded the Renamo offices, located in the densely populated neighbourhood of Munhava.
The demonstrators were threatening to lynch Mbararano. MI cites them as saying “We want to burn this man Mbararano alive, because he’s a traitor. We’ve been betrayed by Mbararano and by brigadiers Machava and Faque. We’re screwed. They’ve sold Beira to Frelimo and to Lourenco Bulha” (the Frelimo candidate for mayor).
Other shouts heard during the demonstration were “It’s a disgrace, Dhlakama! Wake up! It’s in all our interests to stop Beira falling into the hands of the communists!” (Although Frelimo abandoned Marxism-Leninism in 1989, Renamo still has the quaint notion that its adversaries are somehow “communist”).
Mbararano was punched, but the less violent wing of the pro-Simango faction saved him from a worse fate by hiding him in one of the offices. Later that evening, Renamo armed guards arrived to rescue him. Renamo keeps an entirely illegal armed force of a couple of hundred men, known as the “Presidential Guard”, in Sofala province. Most of them are in old Renamo military bases in Maringue and Cheringoma district, but Moises Machava, who held the rank of brigadier in Renamo’s guerrilla army, was able to mobiles some of them to save Mbararano’s neck.
Faque had already fled. After the events of Thursday night both men disappeared from public view and switched off their cell phones.
Nonetheless, MI managed to contact Mbararano and Faque, who both stuck to the line that “the grass roots” had decided to exclude Simango, and that the demonstrations were just the work of a group of Simango enthusiasts who did not want to accept “the will of the grass roots”.
That is not the opinion of the Renamo neighbourhood secretaries who spoke to the paper. Mondlane Natal, secretary of the Tchonja neighbourhood declared “I’ve never seen Manuel Pereira at the grass roots. We weren’t consulted about him. That’s why the population is sad about this decision and is proposing Daviz Simango as an independent candidate”.
The secretary of Nhangau neighbourhood, Armando Chico, declared “We don’t know Manuel Pereira by sight. President Dhlakama is going to destroy Renamo in Beira if he doesn’t retreat”.
(AIM)