At a press conference this Thursday in Luanda, the leader of the parliamentary bench of the main opposition party, Liberty Chiaka, said that the lists of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) may include citizens who are not members of the party, but once elected, they cannot join a different party under penalty of losing their mandate.
A group of deputies elected by UNITA, including Abel Chivukuvuku, coordinator of the recently legalized PRA-JA Servir Angola party, requested suspension of their mandate “due to political activities incompatible with the mandate under the terms of the Constitution and the law”, due to their membership in PRA-JA, of which he is a leader, but they ended up losing their mandates.
Liberty Chiaka considered that “there is no controversy”, as this is a constitutional legal imperative and considered that the figure initially used by the deputies to request suspension of mandates “was an oversight”.
“However, there is no evidence of any act of betrayal by UNITA,” he said, stressing that any other allegations are only intended to confuse public opinion.
“This outcome was not decided by the president of the UNITA parliamentary group, nor by the UNITA leadership”, he stressed, considering that it is a matter of the PRA-JA coordination strategy, which UNITA “respects”, despite “there being other paths”.
“We regret what happened and we informed our colleagues who freely decided to leave the UNITA parliamentary group”, he stressed, concluding that the party and its president remain committed to the alternation project.
In the 2022 general elections, UNITA, the Democratic Bloc and PRA-JA Servir Angola ran on an opposition platform that they called the United Patriotic Front (FPU), with some deputies not affiliated with UNITA, such as Abel Chivukuvuku, being elected on the party’s lists.
Liberty Chiaka also admitted that the UNITA parliamentary group was taken by surprise, since the request for suspension was first communicated to the president of the National Assembly, Carolina Cerqueira, whose office later informed the UNITA.
“There was a tendency to blame UNITA for the outcome of not accepting the suspension and imposing the loss of mandate, but this is not UNITA’s will, we simply base our position on the law”, stressed Chiaka, stating that “there is no rupture” in the FPU and that the legitimate decisions of the bodies of all political parties are respected.
“Each party has a strategy, it is important to respect it”, he stressed.
Regarding the departure of Francisco Viana, a member of civil society and member of the FPU, also elected on UNITA’s lists, Chiaka reinforced that the party “respects people’s will to join and disjoin”, but that, by invoking political reasons without legal grounds, the court may have to rule.
Since the beginning of this year, UNITA has lost eight deputies who had been elected on its lists, seven from PRA JA Servir Angola, which was formalized as a party at the end of 2024, and Francisco Viana.
With the departure of this group of deputies, in accordance with the law, the vacancies were replaced by the names that came immediately after on the list of deputies.
