Since the announcement of Mozambique general election results in late October 2024, where the electoral commission declared the ruling party Frelimo the outright victor in the Presidential, National and Provincial elections the country is witnessing an unparalleled social revolt concentrated in the countries urban areas. Over 100 people in the two-month period immediately following the announcement of the results were killed. This figure climbed to an estimated 278 dead on the 02/01/2025 as the revolt and repression are ongoing. The upturn in protest is happening in a wider economic context where the country economic growth has become stagnant since 2016 despite the recent exploitation of natural resources.
The steep rise death toll is a result of increased police repression against a largely unarmed populace who have refused to accept the imposition of the modified election results announced by the government appointed Constitutional Council, the apex court of the country at the end of December. The judges declared that indeed irregularities occurred and went onto decrease the ruling party’s margins of victory but still declared Frelimo the overall winner without providing any substantive evidence as to how the calculated their voting figures.
A potted history of Mozambique’s ruling party help is required to fully grasp why the country is unravelling that has created an uprising of discontent.
Frelimo began its life in 1962 as a nationalist movement dominated by the urban African elite in the country capital in the south of the country, that shares a long and entwined history with the people and economy of South Africa. The geography becomes important because it contains one of the largest coastlines on the continent, stretching a full 2700km. With an economically weak colonising power, the central and northern parts of the country became a zone of intense extraction. The high degree of naked oppression and exploitation undermined its policy of assimilation designed to coopt the local black elite. They instead looked to the wave of anti-colonial revolutions occurring across the world.
It proved impossible for the Portuguese colony to maintain a firm grip on the entire country. Armed resistance to colonial conquest first emerged from the Makonde peasants in the Cabo Delgado region and was only completed in 1921. The geographical terrain lent itself to the prosecution of guerilla warfare during the 1960s allowing Frelimo to create liberated zones with the support of the Mozambique African National Union. The turning point was the Carnation Revolution initiated by Portuguese soldiers against its own dictatorship in 1974. It led to the rapid collapse of the colony as the settlers fled. Frelimo soon declared a ceasefire. Rather than winning power militarily or politically, through mass support at home it was handed to them. This was the context of what locals call have dubbed the first war.
Independence occurred at the height of the Cold War between the USA and the USSR and was formally declared in 1975 following negotiations between Frelimo and Portugal. Angola another former colony soon fell under similar circumstances. It spurred on the confidence of all those who sought an end to the brutal racism of settler colonialism and the cherished goal of national self-determination.
Mozambique’s most southerly and economically developed part of the country bordered South Africa, where local and international capital had deep roots, was deeply integrated into the regional capitalist system. An economy dominated by its militarily aggressive apartheid neighbour wasted no time to destabilise the country. Consequently, Mozambique had very little choice but to join the Russian economic orbit, where continued military support for its army was traded for political influence. Unsurprisingly in 1977 Frelimo the movement transformed itself into a political party declaring itself ‘Marxist Leninist’ and a one-party state. Aware that isolation would doom the nationalist project it provided bases for the neighbouring liberation movements to train their combatants. We all sang the Miriam Makeba song, Mozambique, Aluta Continua.
A proxy war?
South Africa and Rhodesian launch military offensives against its neighbour, and were supported by America. Renamo emerged from the internal frictions following Frelimo’s alignment to Russian ‘communism’, aided significantly by its aggressors. Renamo was able to muster local political support in the densely populated north – central part of the country due to the Frelimo’s policy that curtailed the power of the rural chiefs in favour of a party led by urban based intellectuals. A deeply impoverished peasantry fostered recruitment into the armed sections of Renamo.
A civil war ensued and led to the loss of over one million lives, a high percentage of these lives were lost in the Cabo Delgado region dubbed ‘the second war’. The conventional wisdom viewed the conflict as a proxy war. But it also had deep internal roots that were simultaneously social, political and linguistic. The Macua and Makonde in the north, the Sena and Shona groups in the central parts of the country, and the Shangaan in the south all experience power and benefits from independence differently. Only the educated African elite had a command of Portuguese entrenching the divide. Rural southern african culture and religion did not sit well with the imposition of autocratic control accompanied by a programme of ideological conversion.
Democracy only if you turn a blind eye
The emergence of multi-party democracy in 1992 and the reintegration of the south of the country into the Southern African economy buoyed the emergence of a new and powerful economic elite. The 1990s saw investment limited to the South of the country and added to the notion that the Shangaans (FRELIMO) are only interested in looking after themselves. RENAMO did spectacularly well in the first elections held in 1994 and there is a strong likelihood it won the 1999 elections. The refusal of international observers to view the final tabulation process raised deep suspicions regarding the official outcome.
The negotiation process to a multi-party democracy ensured the electoral process remained fully and legally under the FRELIMO controlled election commission, membership of which was determined by the party share of the vote. With no in built transparency of the final tabulation process, elections have been marred by fraud for twenty-five years. Joseph Hanlon, a respected senior academic and analyst who has reported on the country for over four decades, recently penned a comprehensive report on the history of electoral fraud committed by Frelimo.
A culture of impunity developed alongside a rapid transition away from a state driven economy to a free market economy. The World Bank and the IMF made support conditional on speedy structural economic reform in exchange for state loans in the early 1990s. Growth remained consistent for the first decade but given the weakness of state institutions a free for all for those with political connections was created, the return of the Wild West, a new context where leading journalists like Carlos Cardoso could be gunned down in broad daylight for his investigative reporting into economic crime.
The accumulation of wealth by the new elite was not something that could be hidden, rather it was flaunted. At the same time, state subsidies to keep transport and food cheaper were gradually being eroded creating the first waves of street protests by 2010. Around this time some of the largest deposits of coal and gas in the world were discovered in the country. Corporations were soon queuing up to get in on the act where an overly intimate relationship between government and big business what David Harvey as titled an era of Neo Liberalism as Creative Destruction. A cauldron of dissent was in the making opening new avenues of struggle.
Negative proof can be found in the civil war in Cabo Delgado region that began in 2017 followed the exploitation of one of the world’s largest offshore gas deposits. It’s roots began with unresolved conflicts over local timber, graphite and diamond resources. Local grievances in many instances and resulted in state led repression. The regions ‘third war’ was a result of many interlocking local and international factors that have recently been studied. The establishment of the gas extraction industry in the far north of the country followed the same pattern as coal mining in the Zambezi.
Community claims to the resources are ignored, the only beneficiaries are the politically connected elites who receive the crumbs left on the table by the international corporations. While the local populace is left to watch as their agricultural and fishing livelihoods are adversely affected. A perceived social exclusion is seen as the primary factor from job opportunities is seen many in academia as the primary driver. The Islamists were handed the fertile soil to root their support among the disaffected, particularly among the large youth cohort of the populace. Their Islamist view that the natural resources should belong to the people also clearly resonated and led to a large military presence of Rwanda, Uganda and French soldiers to quell the ongoing insurgency once it became clear that local military were not able to contain the revolt. Presently it is only the Rwandan military that remain whose presence is financed by the EU.
The initial response of the state to local grievances around gas extraction was highly repressive and provided a tighter coherence the resistance that was emerging. Perhaps the governments tyrannical response is best understood in the context of the huge loans secretly signed and sealed by the government on the premise that the countries recently discovered resource base would allow the country to repay the loans.
The ‘hidden debt’ known as the tuna bonds scandal where 2.5 billion US Dollars was loaned in 2012 -2014 from international banks to pay for naval expenditure. It was hidden from parliament and only discovered in 2016. It forced the country to default on its sovereign debt owed to the IMF and World Bank that year plunging the country into an economic crisis devaluing its local currency and is estimated to cost the country a staggering 11 billion US dollars, or an entire year of the country’s GDP. Pushing a further two million people into poverty.
Shorn of its former radicalism Frelimo and embroiled in one corruption scandal after another the “povo” have become increasingly disaffected. A rentier state and class had become openly visible but no party or oppositional movement was willing to organise itself against the imposition of this new form of class power.
Most clearly expressed in the urban municipalities where oppositional political forces have emerged to challenge the hold of Frelimo. However, it’s continued control of the electoral commission has ensured that the provinces and its capital Maputo would stay in its hands much to the chagrin of Venancio Mondlane the present day leader of the opposition. Hanlon’s report states that RENAMO was the clear winner in Maputo in the 2023 election and as such Venancio Mondlane should have been made the Mayor.
The municipal elections in 2023 were in many ways a turning point when it came to openly brazen fraud according to Joseph Hanlon.
There was much more central orchestration with little attempt to keep it secret. In the registration, obvious night time registration and busing in outsiders in municipal buses, as well as the WhatsApp group in Beira, look like flaunting power. The Frelimo control of polling station staff with even a book of all polling station staff in Matola was intentionally provocative. Again, there were no restrictions on the press, CIP or the CIP Eleições – this was the publicity Frelimo wanted. And the final and most public step was the CNE and CC ensuring Renamo did not win Maputo and Matola, despite the overwhelming evidence that they had the most votes. Whereas 1999 had been hidden, this was very public.
The 2024 national elections followed suit. Blatant rigging from above and on the ground by those with vested interests in holding office led to calls for a recount. The Optimist Party for Development (PODEMOS) a centre left grouping that runs for the first time, came second and officially obtained 25% of the vote.
Elvino Dias, a highly respected lawyer acting on behalf of the organisations Presidential Candidate, Venancio Mondlane claimed he had possession of the original election tabulations claiming victory belonged to Mondlane. A week later Dias was gunned down in death squad fashion. A similar fate met a senior leader of the new party. Police statements brushed aside the killing of the latter as a conjugal dispute.
Mondlane fled the country for his safety, the streets erupted following his Facebook call for a phased general strike. Outrage led to spontaneous anger to be expressed at state institutions, Frelimo party offices and police stations were specifically targeted. Mondlane’s anti -corruption and take the country back messaging clearly captured the imagination of the disaffected and particularly the youth, the average median age of Mozambicans is 18. His militant call for protest action galvanised people from across society, leading to numerous internet shutdowns.
Who is Venacio Mondlane?
The 50-year-old Mondlane, a university qualified engineer first courted popularity through his prosperity based evangelical preaching. He has praised Brazil’s Bolsonaro, met with Portugal’s far right Chega, whose autocratic rule was overthrown by the 1974 Carnation Revolution, and welcomed Trump’s victory as a protection of American moral and family values. He launched his political career through the MDM a centre right splinter from RENAMO.
In 2023 he decided to run for the Presidential elections, in need of a political home, negotiations with PODEMOS began, in need of their own presidential candidate. This led him to become the PODEMOS presidential candidate. This occurs despite his open embrace of neo liberalism and the party’s commitment to democratic socialism, a classic a marriage of convenience was born. The deal between the two, that has recently come to light provides exclusive influence for Mondlane over who gets selected to enter parliament.
To date the protest movement for democracy has seen hundreds killed, thousands injured and arrested. Continuing support for the strike scheduled to continue until Jan 15th is threatened by the hunger that is setting as the government struggles to pay its wage bill. Mondlane returned to Mozambique in early January and multi-party talks have begun, he clearly hopes to extract further concessions from the regime. Constrictions clearly exist regarding the development of an opposition capable of challenging the electoral autocracy of Frelimo and the repressive machinery of the state. But constraints can also be the progenitor of innovation. Unleashed by a charismatic militant right-wing preacher the entry of country masses into the arena has begun, the regime will be hard pressed to get them to return, the power to repress should not be equated with the power to rule.
Whether the embryonic movement can be harnessed by its progressive activists to move beyond a Mondlane leadership riddled with contradictions remains to be seen. Unless the movement squarely confronts the class power the neo liberal agenda of the IMF and World Bank has restored, it will quickly lose momentum. History teaches us that clarity and political coherence are essential for any democratic oppositional movement that is able to confront that power.
Rehad is a socialist activist and a documentary filmmaker, he currently completing a feature length project on Mozambique utilising footage shot over a 20 year period.
Be the first to comment