Africa-Press – Mozambique. The National Alliance for a Free and Autonomous Mozambique (Anamola), led by former presidential candidate Venancio Mondlane, has announced that it will not take part in Monday’s provincial ceremonies launching the consultations for reforming the Mozambican Constitution and the electoral legislation, as part of what the government calls the “inclusive national dialogue”.
In a press release explaining this boycott, the Anamola General secretariat protested that Anamola has not been given a seat on the committee organising the dialogue (COTE). The party requested a seat, but has so far received no reply.
The dialogue is based on a document signed in March by President Daniel Chapo and nine political parties, which the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, then transformed into a law.
Most of the parties that signed the initial document are tiny and politically irrelevant. The main opposition figure, Venancio Mondlane, who was runner up in the 2024 presidential election, was not involved in those discussions, and his political party, Anamola, had not yet been formed.
But once Anamola had been set up, Mondlane expressed its interest in taking part.
Judging by the massive attendance at his rallies all over the country, Mondlane is easily the most popular opposition figure in the country. If he and Anamola are excluded from the dialogue, its results are unlikely to be taken seriously.
In its press release, Anamola pointed out that it had been born out of the demonstrations against election results regarded as fraudulent, and “essentially, it represents the spirit of the post-election protests.”
Many thousands of people, the party recalled, had poured onto the streets “to say no to election fraud, no to the injustices against the Mozambican people, for three consecutive months”.
Anamola claimed that no other party had protested actively “against election injustice”. Those who protested “were Mozambicans who saw themselves in the ideals of President Venancio Mondlane. Because of his struggle, they breathed in tear gas for months”. Some of them were shot by the police, or incarcerated, the release added, and ignoring them “means not only ignoring the voice of a substantial part of the population, but also perpetuates the distrust towards the Mozambican democratic institutions”.
Since Anamola’s request for a seat at COTE has been met with silence, it has decided to carry out its own public consultations “to deepen its proposals for reform and its vision for society that the people yearn for after 50 years of systematic and programmed exclusion”.
Anamola will channel the contributions from this consultation to COTE by the cutoff date of 15 December.
Anamola has already distributed preliminary drafts of constitutional amendments and of changes to the electoral legislation.
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