Good afternoon. While police stations are set on fire and the police talk about protesters causing “anarchy” on the road network, President Filipe Nyusi continues to show no interest in finding a political solution to the crisis sparked by the disputed election results, despite being urged to do so by the business association CTA (see below).
Nyusi’s response, which he has repeated in meetings recently, is that any solution needs to be legal and not just political. The implication is that people need to wait for the Constitutional Council, which is responsible for upholding electoral and constitutional law, to confirm the election results.
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It is easy to mock Nyusi for this non-answer. He and his Frelimo party were not worried about legality when the election authorities began the process of manipulating the election several months ago. In Mozambique there is not a single legal institution that is not free from political influence. What is considered “legal” quite often depends on what Frelimo wants.
But the problem with Nyusi’s failure to engage with the protests as a political problem is not really about intellectual objections, it is about life and death, and how many more buildings go up in flames.
