(3 Minutes Read)
Mozambiqe’s ruling party Frelimo’s presidential candidate Daniel Chapo declared winner of an election marred by violence. He is said to have received 70% of the vote after alleged rigging. The two opposition figures were killed by unknown gunmen amid allegations that the results were rigged.
Daniel Chapo, the candidate of Frelimo, received 70.7% of the vote, the election commission said on Thursday(24-10-24) comfortably clearing the 50% mark needed to avoid a second round. Venâncio Mondlane, who had the support of many young voters and who claimed to have won the election, came second out of four candidates with only 20.3%.
Before the vote on 9 October, civil society groups had accused the ruling party, which has ruled Mozambique for nearly half a century, of registering almost 900,000 fake voters, out of an electorate of 17 million. Local and international election observers claimed that the count was then falsified. Mozambique’s Catholic bishops alleged there had been ballot stuffing, while EU election observers noted “irregularities during counting and unjustified alteration of election results”.
Zenaida Machado, a Human Rights Watch researcher, called on authorities to respect the right to peaceful protest and to investigate reports of violence and arbitrary arrests of demonstrators and journalists covering protests.
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Mozambique is one of the world’s poorest countries and is still recovering from the fallout from revelations in 2016 that the government had taken out USD 2 billion in hidden corrupt loans. That led the IMF and other international and bilateral funders to pull financial support, sending the economy into a tailspin
