Rehad Desai writes in the aftermath of last year’s elections in Mozambique, how the country has seen a massive social uprising in the urban areas. Dozens have been killed, beaten and imprisoned as the state has attempted to restore order. The revolt has taken place in the context of disputed elections, economic stagnation and crisis, which has seen the ruling Frelimo party hold onto power with increasing repression.
By Rehad Desai
The Mozambique general election results were announced in late October 2024. The Electoral Commission declared the ruling party, Frelimo, the outright victor in the Presidential, National and Provincial elections. Since then, the country has witnessed an unparalleled social revolt concentrated in the country’s urban areas. Over 100 people have been killed. With the ongoing revolt and repression, by the beginning of January this figure had climbed to an estimated 278.
The upturn in protest is happening in a wider economic context where the country’s economic growth has been stagnant since 2016, despite recent exploitation of natural resources.
The steep rise in the death toll is a result of increased police repression against a largely unarmed populace. They 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 had occurred, and went on to decrease the ruling party’s margins of victory. But they still declared Frelimo the overall winner, without providing any substantive evidence as to how they calculated their voting figures.
What is Frelimo?
A potted history of Mozambique’s ruling party is required to help fully grasp why the country is unravelling, creating an uprising of discontent.
Frelimo began its life in 1962 as a nationalist movement dominated by the urban African elite. It was located in the country’s 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 Mozambique has one of the largest coastlines on the continent, stretching a full 2,700km. 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 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 only ended 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 their own dictatorship in 1974. This 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 have dubbed ‘the first war’.
Independence occurred at the height of the Cold War between the US and the USSR. It 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 region borders South Africa, and the country was deeply integrated into the regional capitalist system, an economy dominated by its militarily aggressive apartheid neighbour. They wasted no time in destabilising 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 combatants. We all sang the Miriam Makeba song, Mozambique, Aluta Continua.
Solidarity with the people of Mozambique has been replaced with support for the Frelimo regime, intent on holding onto power at any costs. Since 1994, the ruling party has been compliant in the reintegration of its economy, largely on the terms laid out by South Africa’s economic elite. Many of Frelimo’s leading party members have personally benefitted from the new order of things.
A proxy war?
South African and Rhodesian military offensives against its neighbour were supported by the US. Renamo emerged from Frelimo’s internal frictions that followed its 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 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, dubbed ‘the second war’, which led to the loss of over one million lives, a high percentage lost in the Cabo Delgado region. 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 experienced 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 the Commission was determined by the party share of the vote. There has been no in-built transparency of the final tabulation process, so elections have been marred by fraud for twenty-five years. Joseph Hanlon is a respected senior academic and analyst who has reported on the country for over four decades. He 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. It was the return of the Wild West, a new context in which leading journalists like Carlos Cardoso could be gunned down in broad daylight for his investigative reporting into economic crime.
A struggle for resource wealth
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, within an overly intimate relationship between government and big business. David Harvey has titled it 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. This followed the exploitation of one of the world’s largest offshore gas deposits. Its roots began with unresolved conflicts over local timber, graphite and diamond resources. These represented local grievances, in many instances, and resulted in state-led repression. The region’s ‘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. The local populace is left to watch as their agricultural and fishing livelihoods are adversely affected. They see themselves as excluded from job opportunities. This is seen by many in academia as the primary driver of conflict.
The Islamists were handed this fertile soil to root their support among the disaffected, particularly among the large number of youth. Their Islamist view, that the natural resources should belong to the people, also clearly resonated. This led to a large military presence of Rwandan, Ugandan and French soldiers to quell the ongoing insurgency, once it became clear that local military were not able to contain the revolt. Presently only the Rwandan military, financed by the EU, remain.
The initial response of the state to local grievances around gas extraction was highly repressive and made the resistance that was emerging more unified. Perhaps the government’s tyrannical response is best understood in the context of the huge loans secretly signed and sealed by the government. This was done on the basis that the country’s recently discovered resource base would allow the country to repay the loans.
The ‘hidden debt’ is known as the ‘tuna bonds scandal’, in which $2.5 billion was loaned in 2012 -2014 by international banks to pay for naval expenditure. It was hidden from parliament and only discovered in 2016. It forced the country to default that year on its sovereign debt owed to the IMF and World Bank, plunging the country into an economic crisis, devaluing its local currency. This is estimated to have cost the country a staggering $11 billion, or an entire year of the country’s GDP, pushing a further two million people into poverty.
A rentier state and class has become openly visible. [1] Shorn of its former radicalism, Frelimo, was embroiled in one corruption scandal after another, and until recently no party or oppositional movement was willing to organise itself against the imposition of this new form of class power. But the increasing disaffection of the ‘Povo’ (the ordinary people) has been most clearly expressed in the urban municipalities. Here, oppositional political forces have emerged to challenge the hold of Frelimo. However, its continued control of the Electoral Commission has ensured that the provinces and the 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 municipal election, so Venancio Mondlane should have been 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 Podemos (the Optimist Party for Development), a centre left grouping running for the first time, came second and officially obtained 25% of the vote.
Elvino Dias, a highly respected lawyer acting on behalf of the organisation’s presidential candidate, Venancio Mondlane, claimed he had possession of the original election tabulations, claiming that 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 militant call for protest action galvanised people from across society, leading to numerous internet shutdowns. His 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.
Who is Venancio 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 morals and family values. He launched his political career through the MDM, a centre right splinter from Renamo.
In 2023 he decided to run in the presidential elections. He needed a political home, and Podemos needed a presidential candidate, so negotiations began. This led to him becoming the Podemos presidential candidate. This occurred despite his open embrace of neoliberalism, while the party is committed to democratic socialism. A classic 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, and thousands injured and arrested. Mondlane returned to Mozambique in early January and multi-party talks began, hoping to extract further concessions from the regime. Constraints 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 the masses into the arena has begun. The regime will be hard pressed to get them to leave. The power to repress should not be equated with the power to rule.
Mondlane called for suspension of the protest movements strikes action and has placed a series of demands that amount for an amnesty for those arrested and detained and free medical support for those injured. Initially he did not rule out accepting an offer to join the government if his conditions were met, but yesterday he backtracked and stated he will not join the government if invited to do so. This had led to the call for low key protests, which have seen the arterial roads into Maputo, the capital to be blocked following the reintroduction of toll fees. The strategy is designed to keep his support mobilised for the first 100 days of the new Presidential rule of Danile Chapo, the Frelimo candidate and is based on 30 measures which is part of what he calls a ‘Decree’ which involves peoples courts following an ‘eye for eye’ approach to justice to stem the wave of extrajudicial killings launched by the police.
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 neoliberal 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 to confront that power.
A version of this blogpost appeared as ‘Enter the Povo’ on Africa is a Country.
Rehad is a South African socialist activist, writer and documentary filmmaker. He is currently completing a feature length project on Mozambique, utilising footage shot over a 20 year period.
Featured Photograph: Electoral Commission of the city of Pemba in Mozambique (2023).
Notes
[1] A rentier class is a class whose wealth primarily comes from passive income, such as rents, dividends, or interest, rather than active work or productive activities.
