Mozambique: MEP asks EU about combatting violence in Cabo Delgado
FILE - For illustration purposes only. [File photo: Fundação Fernando Leite Couto]
Mozambican writer Mia Couto told Lusa on Thursday that he hoped that Frelimo, the ruling party that he once was a member of, would take ‘national interests’ into account when choosing a candidate to succeed Filipe Nyusi for the country’s presidency.
“I hope that there is a solution that takes into account not only Frelimo, but our country, the national interest. And, therefore, this candidate who will be chosen, must be a sensible choice from the point of view that there are things that need to be resolved,” Mia Couto told Lusa regarding the extraordinary session of the Central Committee of the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo), to be held this Friday.
The meeting should serve to define the Frelimo candidate for the presidential elections on October 9, in which Filipe Nyusi can no longer compete, having reached the constitutional limit of two terms.
For Mia Couto, Camões Prize winner in 2013, and who has been outside the party for several years, there are “things” that are “deeply rooted in Frelimo’s own culture and that compel a certain type of rupture”.
“They, obviously, compel the continuation of the great trajectory that Frelimo has had as a party that led to the liberation of this country. But let it continue to be the Frelimo that I knew in the beginning, which was a Frelimo of emancipation, of liberation, that looked at the interests of the most unprotected people first,” he pointed out.
Mia Couto won the Eduardo Lourenço prize in 2012, the North American Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2014, and the Mozambican José Craveirinha prize in 2022, among several others. A return to party life, he says, is out of the question.
“No, I will not return to any political party anymore. But it’s not because it’s Frelimo or anything else. I feel like I can give more by being myself,” he concluded.
On April 22, Frelimo’s political commission convened an extraordinary session of the Central Committee for May 3, in which the candidate for the presidential elections is expected to be chosen.
“The political committee called for the 3rd of May to hold the 1st Extraordinary Session of the Frelimo Central Committee, at the party’s Central School, in the city of Matola, Maputo province,” reads the statement from that body, which met in Maputo under the direction of Frelimo president and head of state, Filipe Nyusi.
The 24th weekly meeting of the political commission aimed to “analyse the current political, economic and socio-cultural situation in the country”, but the statement did not include the agenda of this Friday’s extraordinary Central Committee.
However, the president of Frelimo, Filipe Nyusi, announced on April 6 that the party’s political commission would present the list of candidates for his succession as President of the Republic to the Central Committee in the coming days.
“The political commission will submit to the Central Committee the proposals relating to Frelimo’s candidates for President of the Republic as soon as possible, taking into account the electoral calendar,” Nyusi said, citing statutes, in the closing speech of the two days of the third session ordinary meeting of the Central Committee of Frelimo, the party that has led the country since independence.
Mozambique will hold its seventh presidential and legislative elections on October 9, the second for provincial governors and the fourth for provincial assemblies.
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