When Daviz Simango took office in 2003 as the mayor of Beira, Mozambique’s second most prominent city, the odds were stacked against him. A member of the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO, or the Mozambique Resistance Movement), Simango was one of just five opposition mayors in the country.  Mozambique’s long and bitter civil war between RENAMO, a guerrilla movement at the time, and the ruling party, the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO, or the Liberation Front of Mozambique), left a legacy of hostility and distrust between the parties. Soon after Simango became mayor, the central government began delaying the transfer of funds to his administration, harassing his officials with inspections and publicly undermining his leadership. He responded by strengthening the city’s financial independence through a series of reforms. In addition, he worked through the media to make the public aware of the city’s difficulties with the central government. Simango also took his complaints directly to central-government ministers. Through these efforts, he bolstered the capacity of the municipal administration to tackle the city’s urgent problems of recurring cholera outbreaks and poor sanitation. 

 

The government of Mozambique began to decentralize in the early 1990s as the country emerged from 16 years of civil war. The minister of state administration, Aguiar Mazula, pushed for greater citizen involvement at local levels of government, an agenda that opened the sensitive issue of what role would be played by traditional leaders, or chiefs, who wielded strong community influence. Because many chiefs had cooperated with the country’s former colonial powers, the ruling party sidelined traditional leaders and played down related customs when it came to power in 1975. Mazula faced stern political opposition to his belief that the state should recognize the role of traditional interests at a local level. He built diverse support for his ideas, and his successors at the ministry reached a compromise between groups that wanted to involve traditional authorities and factions that regarded the chiefs with suspicion. The move reversed the state’s history of opposition to the chiefs while limiting the chiefs’ influence over local government.

 

 

 

  

Mozambique’s first multiparty presidential and parliamentary elections in October 1994 followed 16 years of civil war. Because neither side had won the conflict, the stakes of the contest were high. Mutual distrust characterized the run-up to the vote. A new electoral law in early 1994 created a multiparty election commission that forced the parties to work together on overcoming the many operational challenges of running elections in a sprawling country severely damaged by war. The commission succeeded in damping the risks of violence that are often associated with competitive elections in such situations, building consensus among members of different political parties. When the election results were announced, all parties accepted them. However, Mozambique struggled after 1994 to overcome the legacy of the institutional arrangements forged during the peace process. The country’s problems demonstrate the challenges that post-conflict countries face in designing processes and procedures to meet the immediate goal of maintaining peace while serving the longer-term aim of developing mature democratic institutions. This memo examines the 1994 elections and the impact that the initial design of the election commission had on subsequent elections. 

 

 

Associated Interview(s):  Miguel de Brito, Ismael Valigy