Good afternoon. There is something grimly appropriate about former Mozambican president Filipe Nyusi being appointed to lead the African Union’s election observation mission in Guinea-Bissau, as one of his predecessors, Joaquim Chissano, announced yesterday. The election process in Guinea-Bissau makes Mozambique look democratic by comparison. The main opposition coalition has been excluded from taking part in the elections on the grounds that candidates submitted their applications late. The same supreme court that ruled this also said that the incumbent president, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, could remain in power until September, even though his five-year term ended in February. In any case, he has stayed on since September.
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Nyusi ought to be an expert in election misconduct by now. The last two elections he presided over, the local elections of 2023 and the national and provincial elections of 2024, saw the most systematic and organised fraud of any Mozambican elections. The large-scale manipulation of the voter roll by electoral authorities meant that the elections had been manipulated before a single vote had been cast, and made it impossible to tell what a fair result would have been. To argue over whether Nyusi personally ordered all this is irrelevant. When electoral officials, prosecutors, police and officials in the ruling party are all working hand in hand to rig an election result, the responsibility can only lie with the head of state and leader of that ruling party.
