Voting, cheating — and killing in Mozambique

Maputo in the 1990s could be a scary place. The war may have been out in the bush, but its terrors lingered in the capital’s streets long after the AK-47s had stopped chattering.

Especially at night when the power failed, and cars and people crept along the potholed streets in the dark.

The city where a senior member of opposition party Podemos (Optimistic Party for the Development of Mozambique) and a lawyer were murdered in their SUV while driving away from a restaurant last week is not that same war-exhausted city. The lights work, most of the time. The abandoned cars have gone from the streets, as have the soldiers standing in darkened doorways with their Czech machine pistols.

Yet the killings of lawyer Elvino Dias and party representative Paulo Guambe show that evil isn’t done with Mozambique. “Unknown gunmen” riddled the car with bullets, 10 of which found their targets.

The murders come after presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane, who ran as an independent with the support of Podemos, said last week’s elections were rigged. Before all the votes were counted, Frelimo candidate Daniel Chapo was comfortably ahead, with about 54% of the vote in the capital alone.

Of course, screaming “rigged” is now de rigueur for anyone who loses an election anywhere these days. The trouble for Chapo, however, is that allegations of vote-buying, political intimidation and “ghosts” on voter rolls in Frelimo strongholds have dogged the ruling party since 1994, when the first pluralist elections after the civil war against Renamo were held.

Dias was preparing a draft of the party’s appeal against the election results, says veteran Mozambique expert Joseph Hanlon. Dias had said his and Mondlane’s lives were in danger.

Back in 2000, investigative journalist Carlos Cardoso, who was investigating huge fraud in Mozambique’s big state bank, warned about what he called Frelimo’s “gangster faction”. Days later, as he left his newspaper offices, two men sprayed his car with bullets. His killers later claimed the president’s son had paid for the hit, while the family of the alleged fraudsters fled to Dubai with the loot. Sound familiar?