Mozambique is on edge ahead of a ruling expected on Monday to determine the final results of October’s disputed elections, after allegations of rigging triggered weeks of protests in which security forces have killed dozens of people.
The opposition presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane has threatened “chaos” if the constitutional council confirms the initial election results, which gave the ruling party candidate, Daniel Chapo, 70.7% of the vote and Mondlane 20.3%.
The Podemos party, which is allied with Mondlane, said it should have 138 out of 250 seats in parliament, instead of the 31 that the election commission said it had won.
Mozambique’s Catholic bishops alleged that ballot-stuffing had taken place, while EU election observers noted “irregularities during counting and unjustified alteration of election results”.
Mondlane has repeatedly said he won and has urged his supporters to take to the streets. This has brought the economy to a near standstill, including shutting the border and disrupting trade with South Africa.
Security forces have cracked down in response, killing at least 130 people and injuring hundreds more, according to Human Rights Watch. Local media reported that security forces shot dead two mourners on 14 December at a funeral for a blogger known as Mano Shottas, who had been killed while livestreaming a protest two days earlier.
Recently, some protesters have become violent, with offices of the ruling party, Frelimo, set on fire and a statue of the former defence minister Alberto Chipande, who is credited with firing the first shot in Mozambique’s war of independence, pulled down.
“On Monday the whole country must stop,” Mondlane said on Friday in one of his regular broadcasts, which he has been streaming on Facebook from an undisclosed location abroad, where he claims he fled to avoid being assassinated.
Mondlane called for prayers in the south-east African country on Sunday. “We are giving the opportunity to pray for the judges of the constitutional council, to pray for [its chair] Dr Lúcia Ribeiro, so that on Monday, from her, justice comes out, the electoral truth does not come out as a lie,” he said.
Mozambique’s outgoing president, Filipe Nyusi, rebutted Mondlane’s claim that he was planning to cling to power, saying in a Thursday evening broadcast that he would leave office in January as planned.
He also implicitly criticised Mondlane, saying: “It worries us that the process of choosing our leaders was transformed into a pretext to induce and exacerbate social tensions and violent acts.”
Zenaida Machado, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the ruling administration had “decided to brand the entire protest movement as violent to justify their own use of excessive force”.
“The fact that some people within a protest have become violent does not label the entire protests violent,” she said.
While most analysts believe there was some level of rigging, some said it was unclear whether Mondlane had won.
“A 70% majority for Frelimo was a massive surprise to everybody,” said Alex Vines, who was part of a group of election observers from the Commonwealth. “But neither … can [you] say that Venâncio Mondlane won. We just don’t know.
“The [opposition party] Renamo vote collapsed in Renamo heartlands,” said Vines, the head of the Africa programme at the thinktank Chatham House. “Frelimo benefited from that. It was in the urban areas that Podemos and particularly Venâncio prospered, which is not enough, necessarily, to get a majority.”
Four of the constitutional council’s seven judges were appointed by Frelimo parliamentarians, while the chair was appointed by Nyusi.
Adriano Nuvunga, the director of the Centre for Democracy and Human Rights, a Mozambican non-profit organisation, said: “Everything will depend on what they say at the announcement – whether they will confirm the current results with minor changes or whether there will be a change, which is unrealistic. We are bracing for impact.”
