New Chairperson for Constitutional Council

29 April 2011

Maputo — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza has appointed prominent businessman Hermenegildo Gamito as the new chairperson of the Constitutional Council, the country’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law.

Although the 67 year old Gamito is by profession a jurist, in recent years he has been better known for his business and political activities. He was once the chairperson of the state-owned People’s Development Bank, and is currently the chairperson of First National Bank-Mozambique, the Mozambican branch of the South African FNB. He chairs the Mozambican Association of Banks.

He is also a past chairperson of the mobile phone company Vodacom-Mozambique, and remains a member of the Vodacom board.

Gamito was a deputy for the ruling Frelimo Party in the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, from 1994 to 2009. He chaired the ad-hoc parliamentary commission that amended the 1990 constitution, producing the constitutional amendments passed in 2004.

Gamito received his law degree from the Classical University of Lisbon. On his return to Mozambique, he taught fiscal law at Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University, and he was also a judge on the Higher Appeals Court, the predecessor of the current Supreme Court.

Gamito’s appointment to the Constitutional Council must be ratified by the Assembly of the Republic. He will then have to drop his business positions, in order to avoid any conflict of interest.

Gamito takes over from Luis Mondlane, who resigned from the Constitutional Council on 17 March, after the Mozambican press had exposed his use of Council funds for personal expenditure, including paying off the mortgage on his house. Mondlane is currently facing disciplinary and possibly criminal proceedings over the alleged abuse of his office for personal gain.

Guebuza also appointed Orlando Quilambo as Vice-Chancellor of the Eduardo Mondlane University, the oldest and largest institution of higher education in the country. The appointment was widely expected, since Quilambo was already Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and thus in a strong position to succeed Filipe Couto, who announced last month that he was not seeking a second term of office.

The new Deputy Vice-Chancellor is Ana Mondjana, a senior figure in the university’s economics faculty.

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