Renamo Urged to Change Its Parliamentary Behaviour

20 May 2011

Maputo — The leader of the parliamentary group of Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo Party, Margarida Talapa, on Friday urged the main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo to review its political behaviour “to bring it into line with the most elementary and universal democratic principles”.

Speaking at the closing session of the March-May sitting of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, Talapa said “the resort to demagogy, disinformation, threats and destabilisation, and the incitement to acts of violence and destruction are not part of any democratic political vocabulary”

Frelimo deplored the use of insult and defamation in speeches by some Renamo deputies. Some of those speeches “display an abject lack of patriotism and Mozambican self-esteem”, said Talapa.

She warned that “we cannot go on living with declarations that disinform and divide Mozambicans”.

“We are prepared to respect you”, Talapa told the Renamo benches. “But we cannot respect people who only open their mouths to speak words that set the country alight, that encourage discord, that endanger the peace for which thousands of our fellow countrymen paid with their blood”.

“Let’s debate reconciliation”, she urged. “Let’s debate ideas for rebuilding the country lacerated by many years of war. Intimidatory speeches about a return to war should be banished from this parliament”.

Talapa appealed to Renamo members and sympathizers “to be guided by the civic principles of respect for human rights and for the freedom of each and every Mozambican”.

She was scathing about Renamo’s habit of boycotting parliamentary activities it disagrees with. Renamo has refused to appoint the four members to which it is entitled on an ad-hoc commission set up to draft amendments to the Constitution. When the chairperson of that commission, Eduardo Mulembue, reported to the plenary, all the Renamo deputies walked out of the chamber in protest.

“We lament the attitude of those who exclude themselves from the constitutional amendments”, said Talapa. “Those who refuse to participate in the national dialogue on such an important matter, cannot be regarded as defending the interests of the voters they say they represent”.

“Disagreeing is a right under democracy”, she added. “But in order to disagree one must be there and participate. We think that exclusion is irresponsible and anti-democratic”.

Dialogue “is the core of any democratic process, an instrument and a means to solve differences”, said Talapa. She urged Renamo to review its “obstructionist stance”.

Such pleas clearly fall on deaf ears. For the leader of the Renamo parliamentary group, Anegelina Enoque, firmly defended Renamo’s boycott tactic.

Renamo, she insisted, thought that amending the Constitution “is neither pertinent nor opportune at a time when the country faces serious problems of poverty, a high cost of living deriving from the world food and financial crises, where Mozambicans are demanding decent wages, where despite all efforts the HIV/AIDS prevalence is rising, where the number of people dropping out of treatment is on the increase because of lack of food, and thousand of Mozambicans are dying of hunger”.

In fact, there have been no reports in recent months of any deaths from hunger. Poverty and the cost of living were also problems the last time the Constitution was amended, in 2004, but in that year Renamo insisted on changes to the Constitution.

Enoque complained that “you can’t spend so much money on revising what doesn’t need to be revised”. She was, however, accurate when she added that so far Frelimo has not revealed which clauses in the Constitution it wishes to amend.

Enoque also claimed that the law granting rights to veterans of both the independence war and of the war waged by the apartheid South African regime against Mozambique was “unjust, discriminatory and unconstitutional”.

In her view it was “discriminatory” because it does not place veterans of the national liberation struggle on the same footing as former Renamo guerrillas. In short, it does not regard those who fought to liberate the country and those who fought to destroy it as equivalent.

She claimed that Frelimo had used the “dictatorship of the vote” to pass the law. The “dictatorship of the vote” is one of Renamo’s favourite phrase, which just means that Frelimo has more deputies than Renamo has, and so wins any vote – a normal occurrence in any parliament where one party holds a clear majority of seats.

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