On Sunday evening, the Central Committee of Mozambique’s Frelimo ruling party elected Daniel Chapo as the party’s candidate during the 9 October 2024 presidential election.
Initially billed as a one-day event, the extraordinary Central Committee meeting ended up lasting three days.
Chapo prevailed over three adversaries, including Frelimo’s secretary-general, after one of the candidates out of a list of five dropped out of the race.
After a first round in which nobody cleared the 50 percent plus one threshold, with Chapo garnering 103 votes against 77 of his closest adversary, the secretary-general, Roque Silva, the former ran unopposed in a second round where 94.1 percent of the 253-strong body elected him as their candidate, following Silva’s withdrawal.
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Observers described the session as the tensest Central Committee meeting in Frelimo’s recent history. Not even the session that saw Filipe Nyusi, the party’s current chairperson and Mozambique’s president, was that tense.
A contributing factor was arm-wrestling between Nyusi and the rest of the Central Committee, with the former refusing to countenance the body’s choice of candidates.
On day one, he submitted a shortlist with three names, which was rejected by the Central Committee members, who demanded that he include more names – the names in the shortlist were those of the then secretary-general, Roque Silva, Damião José, a member of the Political Commission, and Daniel Chapo, until then governor of the southern province of Inhambane.
Nyusi appeared to accept the Central Committee’s demands, and the session was interrupted with the latter believing they would have a chance to submit the names of their candidates of choice the following day. However, the following day Nyusi reneged on the deal, dragging the session well into the night when he again promised the Central Committee that they could add more names to the list the following day.
On Sunday, the Central Committee members submitted five names to the Political Commission but when the list came back, had five names but none from the list they had submitted.
Outsmarted?
The Central Committee members had gone home on Saturday night thinking that they had thwarted Nyusi’s plan of forcing Roque Silva down their throats. Silva is a hated figure by the majority of members: his authoritarian streak never ingratiated him with the rank and file; to make matters worse, on various occasions he insulted the intelligence of the average Mozambican, going as far as calling his boss, Nyusi, a god; both he and Nyusi contributed to the weakening of Frelimo, leading to general discontentment, which contributed to the party being defeated in key cities, including Maputo and Matola, in the municipal elections of October 2023 – however, massive rigging involving the electoral bodies and the Constitutional Council secured victories for Frelimo.
With Silva’s star shining so dimly, the question in everyone’s mind was why Nyusi was determined to see him elected. One school of thought posited the idea that Silva was the only one who could protect Nyusi from his enemies.
There is a sizable segment of Mozambicans who believe that Nyusi three former President Armando Guebuza under the bus when the $2.2 billion hidden debt scandal became news, when he set a precedent by giving the green light for the courts to prosecute and sentence former President Armando Guebuza’s son, Armando Ndambi Guebuza, and 10 other people on charges related to the scandal; he has been accused of burning bridges with some of his comrades in crucial moments in the life of the party.
Furthermore, Nyusi has yet to explain the deals he made with Rwandan President Paul Kagame that paved the way for Rwandan troops to assist Mozambican forces in the northern province of Cabo Delgado in the fight against an Islamist insurgency, as well as those with modern-day mercenary outfits such as the Russian Wagner Group, and South African Dyk Advisory Group, among other secret deals.
Hence, Nyusi feared that his comrades might decide to pay him back for his shenanigans once he no longer controls the levers of power, which led him to strike a bargain with Silva.
Consequently, he kept fending off any attempts from the Central Committee to add their candidates to the shortlist.
The belief was that immediately before the vote, the other two candidates in the initial shortlist would drop out of the race, leaving him to run unopposed.
The dauphin
The other school of thought believes that Nyusi ran circles around the Central Committee. For the proponents of the idea, it simply did not make sense that he would propose so flawed a candidate such as Roque Silva after realising that he did not enjoy the support of most of the Central Committee’s members, as that would be tantamount to political suicide.
Consequently, Nyusi planted Daniel Chapo in the shortlist list to achieve two objectives: play on Silva’s ego to get rid of him from the secretariat – the narrative is that Nyusi had realised Silva was dead weight, who would continue to cause discontentment between party and Mozambicans. Indeed, there were wide celebrations when news broke out that Silva had lost the election, and had immediately renounced his post as secretary-general.
The other objective was to play on the Central Committee members’ hatred of Silva to have them vote on the “lesser devil” and his dauphin – a journalist who is friends with Chapo told Mozambique Insights that he has not been able to text or talk with him for the past three weeks, meaning that he must have been preparing for the vote.
His own man?
The question is whether Chapo will protect him. Only time will tell. Observers are quick to point out that at one stage Guebuza had wanted to remain as the chairperson of Frelimo to maintain control of the party and government until he was told to ride off into the sunset.
Thus, he lost control Nyusi, but had found out the hard way when he was thrown under the bus.
Sources told Mozambique Insights that Nyusi thinks the best deal for him would be to remain as party chairperson beyond 2027 when his second-term runs out, and thus create a bicephalic structure of power, with Chapo as country president on the other hand, as it is expected Frelimo will win the forthcoming elections.
This seems to have one wrinkle. At one stage, Central Committee members were considering a motion of censure against Nyusi, which would have had severe consequences for his future. Likely, the same group might challenge him should he wish to stay at the helm of Frelimo indefinitely.
Perhaps, that is when it will be clear to Mozambicans whether Chapo is just a plant or his own man.
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