Mozambique’s main opposition party Renamo on Tuesday made an appeal with the country’s top court to annul the result of the general elections held earlier this month, reported Reuters. The voting results declared incumbent President Filipe Nyusi as the winner.
Nyusi and his ruling Frelimo party won big in the election. As per the results declared by the National Election Commission, Nyusi won 73 percent of the vote, while Ossufo Momade, the candidate for the main opposition party and former guerrilla movement Renamo, trailed far behind with 21.88 percent of the vote. Daviz Simango, of the third-largest party, the Mozambique Democratic Movement, secured just over four percent of the vote.
It was expected that the elections would calm tensions in Mozambique, but, the contested result, instead, has led to divisions as opposition parties have cried foul.
“We want the election results to be annulled because they were not elections,” Venancio Mondlane, a Renamo representative, told Reuters. “They were a caricature, a circus show.”
Mondlane said that the party filed the appeal to the Constitutional Council (CC) against the deliberation of the National Election Commission, which they do not agree with. He said the party has demanded that the CC annul the election results.
The opposition parties have demanded an audit of the process that it said was tarnished after electoral administration bodies manipulated the process from the outset.
The election was believed to set the seal on a fragile peace pact signed between Frelimo and Renamo to put a definitive end to four decades of violence. The two parties were into a 16-year civil war that ended in 1992. However, there have been clashes sporadically since. The pact is now at risk of falling apart as opposition parties reject the election results.
