Pretoria – Mozambique’s former Prime Minister, Mario Machungo, died on Monday in Portugal where he was receiving medical treatment, Mozambican media reported.
Machungo was born on December 1940 in Maxixe, in Mozambique’s southern province of Inhambane.
From his days as a student in the Lisbon Technical University, where he obtained a master’s degree in economics in 1969, he was a clandestine militant of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), according to online publication Club of Mozambique.
He worked as an economist in one of the main Portuguese banks, the Banco de Fomento Nacional, first in Lisbon, and then in Maputo, which was known as Lourenco Marques at the time.
His Frelimo membership reportedly became known after the fall of the colonial-fascist regime in Portugal on April 1974. In the transitional government set up after the independence agreement was negotiated in September that year, Machungo was appointed Minister for Economic Coordination.
Club of Mozambique reports that in the first government appointed by former president Samora Machel in June 1975, Machungo was Minister of Industry. In 1978, he was moved to the agriculture portfolio and in 1980 became Minister of Planning.
In 1986, Machungo became independent Mozambique’s first Prime Minister – a post which had not existed in the immediate post-independence governments.
Machungo is the second member of Samora Machel’s Political Bureau to die within a week. The first was the veteran nationalist and founder member of Frelimo, Marcelino dos Santos, who died last Tuesday at the age of 90, according to the online publication.