Election race heats up

A group of men gathered last week in the heart of Mozambique's second city, Beira, in the central province of Sofala, arguing over who would win the mayoral seat in the upcoming local elections. Their opinions were divided. One elderly man, who did not want to be named, was emphatic: "RENAMO will win, because of the father's name." He was referring to the late Ureus Simango, who was deemed a traitor in the 1970s by the ruling party, FRELIMO, and later "disappeared" in one of the re-education camps in the north of the country. The RENAMO candidate for mayor, David Simango, is one of Ureus Simango's sons. Another man dismissed Simango's name as not so influential. He argued that one's ethnic group was what mattered. There are two main ethnic groups in Beira: Ndau, to which the RENAMO candidate for mayor, Simango, belongs; and Sena, the ethnic group of the FRELIMO candidate, Lorenco Djalma. RENAMO leader, Afonso Dhlakama, is also an Ndau. The campaign for the 19 November polls to elect both mayors and representatives in 33 municipalities around the country began officially last week. Although other political parties are contesting the local elections, the race is really between FRELIMO - which has ruled Mozambique since independence - and the RENAMO Electoral Union (a coalition of 10 parties with the main opposition party, RENAMO). RENAMO, the former rebel movement that ran a brutal insurgency in the 1980s, is traditionally strong in the central and populous northern provinces, winning the majority of seats there in the 1999 general elections. Countrywide, FRELIMO scooped 133 seats to RENAMO's 117 in those polls. It is hoped that these local elections – the country's second since the adoption of a multiparty system in 1994 - will be more successful than the first, in 1998, which was boycotted by RENAMO and had a turnout of just 15 percent. Without RENAMO contesting, FRELIMO achieved complete control of the new municipal authorities, headed by the directly elected mayors. However, the lead-up to this year's campaign has not been easy. Funding for the Electoral Administration Technical Secretariat (STAE) arrived late, the registering material ran out, and voter education agents lacked transport. The STAE, however, has put a brave face on the setbacks and is predicting a strong voter turnout. The electoral campaign got off to a nervous start when Jose Manteigas, the RENAMO candidate for mayor of Mocuba in the central province of Zambezia, was disqualified by the National Elections Commission (CNE) for falsifying the documents he used to show that he was a resident of the town. Dhlakama warned that he did not know how the Mocuba residents would react if the decision was not overturned. Following the CNE's decision, RENAMO is now reportedly asking for the disqualification of three FRELIMO mayoral candidates. So far, the campaign in Beira appears to have gone smoothly. Besides the two main mayoral contenders, two other men are in the race in a province where RENAMO won most of the parliamentary seats in the 1999 general elections. Twenty-seven-year-old Tiago Franca, a hotel receptionist, told IRIN: "Both [RENAMO and FRELIMO] candidates are very strong. It will be a struggle. They are both well known in Beira, and both are young people." Simango was not available to be interviewed when IRIN visited Beira, but Djalma said he was "convinced of a FRELIMO victory". He said that, "although lots of people have a tendency to defend their ethnic group, I feel that I have the support from all the groups. I can speak Sena and Ndau, and I can greet people in the six main local languages of this region." Djalma conceded there was a lot of work to be done in Beira, which looks like a distinctly poor relative of Maputo, the capital. Homeless people hang around the dirty streets, buildings need a fresh coat of paint, stagnant water lies in greenish pools – a constant problem as Beira is below sea level - and many homes lack running water. Visiting Radio Mozambique's studios in the heart of the city underlines how poor the infrastructure is. Children and women carefully balance 25-litre buckets of water on their heads for their daily use as they climb up the grubby, dark staircase to their apartments. Franca, the hotel receptionist, commented: "Political power is centralised in Maputo and Beira is left behind. We need more business, the city has a water problem, unemployment is high, we have a lot of layabouts and our women are going into prostitution openly now." At one time the Beira Corridor - a road and railway connecting the city of Beira to Zimbabwe - promised to revive the city, but now business along the corridor has virtually collapsed, along with the Zimbabwe economy. The HIV/AIDS epidemic, however, has taken advantage of the mobility along the corridor and Beira has one of the highest infection rates in the country, at over 15 percent of the adult population.