Ana Rita Sithole

Ana Rita Geremias Sithole made her career in FRELIMO and in Mozambique's Assembly of the Republic. O Pais and Integrity Magazine reported that she represented the party as a deputy for four legislatures, beginning in 1994. Official records of the Constitutional Council and the government gazette list her as a FRELIMO member for the Inhambane constituency in the legislatures elected from 1999 onwards, including those of 2014 and 2019. In January 2025 O Pais described her as having more than 30 years of experience in parliamentary life.

In parliament she was a member of the Standing Commission of the Assembly of the Republic. Within FRELIMO she was a member of the Political Commission, the party's senior leadership body, and she headed the party's list of parliamentary candidates for Inhambane, campaigning among veterans of the liberation struggle, the party's women's and youth organisations (OMM and OJM), religious leaders and school directors in the province.

In November 2022, at the 42nd ordinary session of the OACPS Parliamentary Assembly in Maputo, she took office as President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States and Co-President of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, alongside the Portuguese MEP Carlos Zorrinho. In March 2023 the two co-presidents urged the EU Council to sign the post-Cotonou agreement quickly, warning that the expiry of the Cotonou Agreement at the end of June 2023 would otherwise leave a legal gap that would stop the joint assembly meeting. In September 2023 they issued a joint statement on the coups in Niger and Gabon.

She later said that during her three years in the post she had the privilege of presiding, with her European counterpart, over the parliamentary dimension of the negotiations on the Samoa Agreement, the OACPS-EU partnership agreement signed on 15 November 2023 to replace the Cotonou Agreement. She met Angola's President Joao Lourenco in his role as chair of the OACPS summit of heads of state and led parliamentary diplomacy missions to the United Nations General Assembly and the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Mozambique's presidency ended on 25 February 2025, when she handed over to Thomas Tayebwa of Uganda.

She also appeared as a commentator on Mozambican politics, including on RTP Africa's Forum Africa in May 2024 after FRELIMO chose Daniel Chapo to succeed Filipe Nyusi.

Ana Rita Sithole died on Sunday 18 October 2026 after an illness. According to O Pais, which first reported her death, she had been in hospital in South Africa receiving medical treatment. Her age at death, the nature of the illness and funeral arrangements were not given in the first reports. Integrity Magazine, reporting her death the same day, described her passing as the loss of a figure with a long record in Mozambican parliamentary representation and parliamentary diplomacy.

Sithole belonged to the generation of FRELIMO legislators whose parliamentary careers ran from the multiparty era of the 1990s into the 2020s. Her term at the head of the OACPS Parliamentary Assembly put a Mozambican woman at the centre of relations between the African, Caribbean and Pacific states and the European Union at a decisive moment, as the Cotonou Agreement that had governed those relations since 2000 gave way to the Samoa Agreement.