Mercedes Sayagues
“Citizens, wake up and throw away your fear!” thundered Alice Mabota, Mozambique’s fearless human rights defender. Behind her, a banner read: “While our brothers and sisters are dying, someone is stealing our money”.
Mabota was addressing hundreds of people who thronged central Maputo last Saturday to protest the unravelling of Mozambique’s democracy and economy.
Back to war
The conflict is militarily low-intensity but is hurting people and trade badly. Twelve thousand Mozambicans have fled to Malawi; hundreds reportedly crossed last week into Zimbabwe and 500 families are displaced in Inhambane province. Refugees in Malawi tell harrowing stories, documented by Human Rights Watch, of torched villages, rape and looting by Mozambican armed forces.
Dozens of rural schools and clinics are deserted. Renamo (the Mozambican National Resistance) has attacked trucks, buses and coal trains. The railway Tete-Beira is closed. On two highways in Sofala and Manica provinces, vehicles must travel in armed convoy.
The UN says at least 14 Renamo officials were murdered or abducted in 2016, while Renamo has killed both civilians and police in clashes.
Death squads are at work. Some 25 corpses have turned up in the bush in Manica province. Peasants say there are more. About a dozen, with signs of torture, were dumped from a bridge on to a dry river bed in Macossa district and photographed by journalists in April. The bodies were later buried, without an autopsy, so hastily that in May Al Jazeera filmed skulls and bones half-covered with soil.
Negotiations have been on and off since conflict broke out in late 2015. What does Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama want? A bigger slice of the natural resources cake, integration of his militia into the army, and governing six provinces where he claimed victory in the contested 2014 elections.
(Renamo won the presidential vote in five provinces and the parliamentary poll in two. Widespread fraud was documented.)
Toxic debt
A scandal exploded in April when the International Monetary Fund – and astonished Mozambicans – learnt of secret debts worth $2.2 billion, contracted by the previous government of Armando Guebuza, bypassing Parliament. This is unconstitutional.
As a result, 14 donor countries and international lending agencies stopped direct budget support, equivalent to 12% of public spending.
The loans benefited three companies, EMATUM, ProIndicus and MAM, linked to the intelligence service (Sise – Serviço de Informação e Segurança do Estado) and part of the security/military/Guebuza empire.
They have little to show except the riot police’s new equipment. The tuna fishing and patrol boats rust in Maputo’s harbour. Most of the money has vanished.
The NGO coalition that organised Saturday’s march demands a forensic audit to trace the money and bring culprits to court.
Mozambique’s defence and security spending now amounts to one-quarter of the national budget, estimates Africa Confidential. This is more than thrice its health spending. (South Africa budgeted 4% for defence and security in 2015.)
“Mozambicans now face the prospect of penury under the yoke of debt repayments on an epic scale,” added Africa Confidential.
Total debt stands at 90% of GDP – unmanageable, say economists. In May, Mozambique missed a $178 million debt payment deadline.
The country faces illiquidity. Dollars are scarce. At the airport, banks only exchange meticais for rand or euros. The metical is on free fall, trading at 60 to the dollar this week, compared to 30 last year. Inflation hit 19% in May.
Hotels in Inhambane are closing or letting staff go. In Cabo Delgado, where the mirage of a natural gas boom fades as Anadarko cuts back staff and spending, 1 000 people have lost jobs. Drought and low international prices for commodities compound the problem.
Since December, government payments to suppliers are erratic. National airline LAM must fly to Johannesburg with enough fuel for the return trip since oil company BP cut its credit because it owes $3m.
Mozambique’s first coping strategy is a garage sale of its airports, railways and cellphone towers, possibly of LAM and other parastatals. The second might be to borrow from China against future gas production.
Rampant represssion
As the regime feels under pressure, freedom of expression is under attack by legal or violent means. In May, academic and TV political commentator Jaime Jose Macuane was abducted and shot four times in the legs – “a warning”, the unmasked attackers told him. In his last TV interview, Macuane had said: “When the state does not clear up crimes, the state is showing that it survives off organised crime.”
Macuane was alluding to a string of unsolved murders: a judge and a prosecutor investigating dozens of Mafia-style kidnappings for ransom, and a lawyer who argued that Renamo’s demand for provincial autonomy was not unconstitutional.
Also in May, Benedito Sabão, a peasant farmer and Renamo supporter from Manica province, was arrested, threatened with death and shot at as he escaped into the bush, according to Amnesty International. While recovering from surgery at Maputo Central Hospital, armed men tried to kidnap him.
Last week, the editor and the newsroom chief of the Zambeze weekly newspaper were ordered at gunpoint to go to the police for questioning over war-related stories.
Alice Mabota, head of the Mozambican League of Human Rights, received death threats via SMS before the march. “Obstinacy is paid with death; may your soul rest in peace,” read one. Another threatened to kidnap her daughter.
Activists fear e-mail and telecoms are illegally intercepted, with Chinese state-of-the-art technology acquired by the Guebuza administration.
We live “in a reign of terror”, said the NGO coalition statement. “If you speak out, you can suffer serious consequences… you can be killed, you can lose your job.”
Thus, the march, although small, emboldened activists. “It took courage to come,” said Maria José Arthur, of Women in Law in Southern Africa.
The stirring chant, “We don’t accept and we won’t pay this debt!”, may have reached the IMF delegation in Maputo this week to investigate what its boss, Christine Lagarde, has described as a government “clearly concealing corruption”.
Ironically, the IMF and the Word Bank were the No 1 peddlers of the Mozambique: Africa’s Rising Star narrative, wilfully ignoring the rumbles of corruption, repression and war patent during the last years of Guebuza’s presidency. That narrative is looking tatty.
For more information, visit, www.fmo.org.mz/documentos/Position-paper-Civil-Sociecty-Moz.pdf; www.africa-confidential.com/article/id/11658/Secret_security_debts_devastate_economy, or www.hrw.org/news/ 2016/02/22/mozambique-mass-flight-over-reported-army-abuses
See more at: www.chatham house.org/expert/comment/ how-can-mozambique-manage-its-debt-crisis?#sthash.pHOevi8Q.dpuf; www.fmo.org.mz/ documentos/Posicionamento-FMO-2016-divida-publica-II.pdf; www.iese.ac.mz/wp-content/ uploads/2016/06/IESE_Ideias86.pdf; www.tradingeconomics. com/mozambique/inflation-cpi
l Sayagues is a journalist, media trainer and researcher who specialises in HIV and Aids, health, gender, human rights and humanitarian issues