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MAPUTO — A cholera outbreak in parts of Mozambique hit by floods has killed 19 people, the government said, raising the death toll from one of the worst disasters to hit southern Africa in years. Another 158 people have died in Mozambique in flooding triggered by heavy rains at the start of the year, which also affected Malawi, Madagascar and Zimbabwe.
Mozambique’s deputy health minister Mouzinho Saide said late on Tuesday that flooded rivers had started to subside in the country’s northern and central provinces, easing the plight of about 177,000 people affected by the rain storms.
Neighbour Malawi has said 276 people were killed or are missing as the region counts the human and economic costs of torrential rains.
Rivers have burst their banks, flooding vast areas and destroying homes, bridges and crops.
Meanwhile, Mozambican opposition lawmakers who had vowed to boycott the new government after losing the October elections were to be sworn-in to the national assembly yesterday after weekend talks with President Felipe Nyusi.
“According to statements of Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama, following his meeting with the president, members of Renamo will be sworn in Wednesday (yesterday),” Renamo spokesperson Antonio Muchanga told a news conference.
Dhlakama had previously claimed the October elections which brought the ruling Frelimo party back to power were fraudulent, boycotting Nyusi’s inauguration ceremony and shunning the opening of parliament.
He threatened to form a parallel government in parts of the country where his party came out top in the election.
But after talks with Nyusi on Saturday, Dhlakama told reporters he was “very satisfied” with the meeting with “my brother, the president”.
On Monday, he announced his party would table a bill that would give more autonomy to the country’s 11 provinces — in five of which his party won the majority of votes during the October election.
Dhlakama, a former rebel leader, has disputed the outcome of every poll since 1990, and in the months leading up to the October poll led a low-level insurgency against the government from his bush hideout.
But the October election showed his popularity was growing again —he took 37 percent of the vote, more than double his 2009 score.
Nyusi won 57 percent, sharply down on the 75 percent garnered by his predecessor.
Nyusi had at his swearing-in ceremony pledged “to open constructive dialogue” with all political forces in a country that was ravaged by a brutal 16-year civil war that ended in 1992. — Reuters/AFP.
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