A police officer and a citizen died on Friday as a result of protests in Mozambique over contested local election results, according to a corruption watchdog group. In four cities, police reported making 70 arrests in total, but no fatalities.
Following the official confirmation of the election results on Thursday, which awarded victory to the incumbent Frelimo party in 64 out of 65 towns, there was disturbance. In the elections on October 11, a group of election observers had documented widespread voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and results manipulation in Frelimo’s favour.
During the protests, which were centred in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, and the northern cities of Nampula and Nacala, protestors blocked streets.
Renamo, the principal opposition party in Maputo, organised a march of its supporters. Other protestor groups obstructed major thoroughfares by arranging heaps of burning tyres and rubbish. Tear gas and airstrikes of AK-47 bullets were used by plainclothes and riot police to disperse protestors.
The Centre for Public Integrity, a Mozambican anti-corruption group, reports that the police officer died in Nampula and the citizen died in Nacala. According to local media station TV Sucesso, tear gas grenades in Nampula gravely injured at least two additional persons, one of them was a 6-year-old child.
Sixty people were detained in Nampula, four in Maputo, and the remaining individuals in Nacala and Quelimane, the central city, according to police spokesperson Orlando Mudomane. Inside Renamo’s Maputo branch offices, multiple individuals were observed being taken into custody by police.
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Mudomane would not confirm any deaths during Friday’s protests, but he did say that ten people were hurt.
Since the elections, peaceful protests spearheaded by Renamo have occurred throughout the 32 million-person nation in southern Africa. The election results brought Renamo authority over eight municipalities down to zero.
Renamo defeated Frelimo, according to a parallel vote count conducted by the coalition of election monitors in the major cities of Quelimane, Nampula, Matola, and Maputo. This would have been the first time since Mozambique’s independence from Portugal in 1975 that an opposition party has held control of the nation’s capital.
Between 1977 to 1992, Frelimo and Renamo engaged in a brutal civil war that is estimated to have claimed the lives of over a million people. In 1994, Mozambique held its first democratic elections after a peace agreement.
More animosity between the parties developed as a result of a disagreement over the outcomes of the 2014 general election, and a fresh peace deal was reached in 2019.
VOA
