Incumbent President Filipe Nyusi has been re-elected in Mozambique’s election this month after a landslide victory, the electoral commission announced on Sunday, reported Reuters.
The commission chairman Abdul Carimo said Nyusi of the ruling Frelimo party scored 73 percent of the vote, while Ossufo Momade of Renamo, the rebel group turned opposition party, got almost 22 percent. Frelimo won 184 seats, Renamo 60 seats and the MDM party got six seats out of the 250-seat National Assembly.
Addressing supporters in a suburb of the capital Maputo, Mr. Nyusi said he would work hard to further develop Mozambique and boost the implementation of the deal.
“I will work so that we can have a prosperous, equitable and fair Mozambique,” he said. “In these elections, the Mozambican people won.”
In his next five-year term, Mr. Nyusi will be responsible for overseeing a gas boom led by oil giants such as Exxon Mobil Corp and Total, battling a festering Islamist insurgency and delivering on a peace deal signed two months ago.
The election was expected to set the deal signed between Frelimo and Renamo aimed at putting a definitive end to four decades of violence between the two parties. The two were involved in a 16-year long civil war that ended in a truce in 1992 but there have been sporadic clashes since.
But as soon as the results started popping in, the opposition parties rejected the results, claiming they were tarnished by fraud, violence, and irregularities from the outset. Frelimo, on the other hand, said the elections were free and fair.
Earlier on Sunday, Daviz Simango, the presidential candidate of the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), who secured over four percent of the vote, said his party sees the election result as null and void. He even demanded an audit of the election process that it claimed was affected after electoral administration bodies manipulated the process from the outset.
