Conflict may be low intensity but it's hurting Mozambique's people and trade, writes 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 on June 18 to protest against the unravelling of Mozambique’s democracy and economy.
The conflict is militarily low-intensity but it's 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 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 this year, while Renamo has killed both civilians and police in clashes.
Death squads are at work. About 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 autopsies – so hastily that last month Al Jazeera filmed skulls and bones half-covered with soil.
Negotiations have been on and off since conflict broke out late last year. 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.
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 percent of public spending.
The loans benefited three companies – EMATUM, ProIndicus and MAM – linked to the intelligence service 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 last 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 a quarter of the national budget, estimates Africa Confidential. This is more than thrice its health spending.
“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 percent of GDP – unmanageable, say economists. Last month, 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 percent last month.
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 Joburg 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.
As the regime feels under pressure, freedom of expression is under attack by legal or violent means. Last month, 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 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 last month, 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’s 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.
Mabota received death threats before the march. “Obstinacy is paid with death; may your soul rest in peace,” read one SMS. 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 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”.
The IMF and World Bank were the No 1 pedlars of the Mozambique-Africa’s Rising Star narrative, ignoring the rumbles of corruption, repression and war patent during the last years of Guebuza’s presidency. That narrative is looking tatty.
...
Fast facts
56% - adult literacy rate
68% - primary school dropout rate
43% - stunting among young children
70% - young children are anaemic
54% - births with skilled attendant
50% - live on less than $1 a day – Sources: Unicef, UN, WHO, Household Survey 2015
RANKINGS
178 out of 187 countries in Human Development index
112 out of 168 countries in Corruption Perception index