By Pedro Alarcón
The general election of 9 October 2024 in Mozambique triggered a political crisis in which hundreds of Mozambicans have been killed, injured or arrested. This blog post seeks to explain its origins and implications.
A taxi picks me up at the airport. It has a printed sheet stuck to the windshield: a photo of Venancio Mondlane with the caption povo no poder (people in power). I announce the destination of my trip: 25th September Avenue, downtown Maputo. ‘We’ll get there’, the taxi driver tells me confidently- ‘The protests, you know?’, he comments. I pretend to be unaware of the situation. He explains: ‘Venancio wants to be president’. ‘Will he be?’, I ask. ‘No’, he answers. ‘Frelimo is strong’. It is past four in the afternoon. Along Karl Marx Avenue we hear vuvuzelas. On 25th September Avenue cars with slogans like povo no poder, salve Moçambique (save Mozambique), or simply basta! honk their horns. Three blocks away policemen clear a barricade, smells of tear gas. Kids sell vuvuzelas.
It is mid-December 2024; ten weeks have passed since the 9 October general election. The National Electoral Commission declared Frelimo’s presidential candidate, Daniel Chapo, the winner by a large majority. The Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) has ruled the country since 1975, first as a single party and after 1994 winning all electoral processes. Since then, there has been a crescendo of allegations of fraud. The European Union Election Observation Mission denounced blatant irregularities in the last election. Venancio Mondlane, an independent candidate supported by the party Optimistic People for the Development of Mozambique (Podemos) alleged fraud and declared himself the victor. From abroad, he called for protests. Days after the election, Mondlane’s lawyer, who was preparing to challenge the official results, and a Podemos spokesman were assassinated. Protests mushroomed across the country, resulting in the deaths of at least 130 people by mid-December, and more than 345 people shot and 3,600 arrested.
In trying to understand the crisis, I do not consider Mozambique as an isolated case. After all, 2024 was a watershed for the liberation movements that became ruling parties in the southern part of the African continent. In the May 2024 general election in South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress lost the parliamentary majority for the first time since 1994. In October 2024, the Botswana Democratic Party lost control of the government for the first time since independence in 1966. In December 2024, Namibia’s SWAPO, which has been in power since independence in 1990, managed to retain the presidency despite the worst election result in its history. Will Mozambique be the exception? To shed some light on the question, I delve into the country’s contemporary political economy.
Official history tells that the liberation war began on 25 September 1964, when Alberto Chipande fired the first shots of the Frelimo guerrilla. Ten years later, the guerrilla emerged victorious and became the government of the nascent People’s Republic of Mozambique in 1975. Alberto Chipande was appointed Minister of Defense under the presidency of Samora Machel. The challenges of the new government were enormous: to guide the Mozambican society towards the construction of a project of modernity and national unity from a colonial past of suffering and segregation. The single party became the central tool to strengthen the state institutions and consolidate the government in power. Modernity came by hand of a state that intervened directly in economy and society. To achieve national unity, the state also had to respond to society’s needs of self-determination and cultural integrity and guarantee human and political rights.
Land, banking, industry, and businesses of all sizes abandoned by retornado Portuguese were nationalized. While investments were made in public education, health and infrastructure, the homem novo (new man) became common parlance. Elísio Macamo argues that a basic principle of Mozambican politics has been the notion that “individual liberty is a function of a national political project, and not necessarily inherent to the individuals themselves” or their rights. Methods of re-education, collective execution and punishment were not unusual. Benedito Luís Machava argues that re-education and labor camps were considered by Frelimo leaders as essential to the construction of the morality of the homem novo.
During its Third Congress in 1977, Frelimo declared itself a Marxist-Leninist Party. The national anthem, ¡Viva, Viva Frelimo!, promised that the homeland would be the tomb of capitalism and exploitation. But roads are never straight. Mozambique became one of those places where the Cold War was not cold. Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia promptly built an army to remove Frelimo from government: the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo).
The Mozambican civil war lasted 16 years. David Robinson estimates that while the war killed about one hundred thousand people, another one million lost their lives because of war’s effects such as famine. Five million Mozambicans were forced to become refugees. Renamo destroyed schools, health posts, bridges, and electricity infrastructure to undermine Frelimo’s popular support. In 1982, Mozambique defaulted external debt. Bretton Woods institutions started to claim key arenas in social and economic planning.
Samora Machel was killed in a plane crash in South Africa in 1986. Frelimo appointed Joaquim Chissano as his successor. The first structural adjustment program was drawn up when Machel was still alive. For Frelimo, neoliberal reform was a strategy to secure international aid. The recipe of the so-called Economic Rehabilitation Program did not differ much from the reforms prescribed to other countries defaulting on their external debt, notably Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, the Philippines. In addition to the elimination of controlled prices, devaluations and an aggressive privatization program, the Mozambican recipe had a special ingredient. To seal the exit from socialism, a class of local capitalists had to be created.
Reform opened the gates for the transference of state resources to private pockets. Whereas larger industries went to foreign companies, medium and small businesses were transferred to individual members of the Frelimo party elite. International cooperation encouraged corruption. Joseph Hanlon argues that already by 1988 donors funded loans to the unexperienced businessmen of the Frelimo party elite with no intention that the loans would be repaid. Other misappropriations of public funds followed through the recently privatized banking system.
The 1990 Constitution was meant to settle the transition of the socialist state towards a market economy and from the single party system to a liberal democracy through multi-partyism and elections. With the falling of the Berlin Wall, the civil war ended with the Rome Peace Accords of 1992. Frelimo’s candidate and acting president Chissano won the 1994 election against Renamo’s leader Afonso Dhlakama. With the entering into force of the constitution, the country became the Republic of Mozambique. Marxist rhetoric was removed from state parlance. Street names in Maputo recall a remote socialist dream.
During Chissano’s period (1986-2005), development aid accounted for more than fifty percent of the state budget. The government was more accountable to donors than to society. In 1999, Chissano was reelected with a narrow margin against Dhlakama. Nevertheless, Renamo became the principal oppositional force in the Assembleia da República(National Parliament) with enough leverage to demand a limited flow of state resources to benefit its leading members.
When Frelimo’s Armando Guebuza won the 2004 election against Renamo’s Dhlakama, Alberto Chipande was already a successful businessman with his enterprises receiving (and not repaying) loans funded by state resources. Joseph Hanlon and Theresa Smart recap that by 2005, a company linked to Chipande had repaid 82 percent of its loan, whereas a company linked to President Guebuza had actually repaid only one percent. Alberto Chipande was appointed member of the Council of State, a four member-body created by Guebuza himself to advise the president. According to José Jaime Macuane, Lars Buur and Celso Marcos Monjane, during Guebuza’s period (2005-2015), the available economic opportunities were distributed among inner circle members.
The personal trajectory of Alberto Chipande illustrates the metamorphosis of Frelimo and the fate of Mozambique: a guerrilla combatant turned into a high-ranking government official and then into a business mogul with a say in national politics. Many analysts highlight the fact that Chipande’s support was key to the election of Filipe Nyusi as successor of Armando Guebuza within Frelimo, and also for his victory in the 2014 presidential election against Dhlakama. Chipande and Nyusi are native of the Northern province of Cabo Delgado, where Chipande holds interest in many investments, including the hydrocarbon sector.
Frelimo turned from a mainly rural guerrilla into the single governing Marxist party during the civil war, to the democrats overseeing neoliberal reforms—with practically the same people in charge. Furthermore, the government was central to turn the country into the “donor darling” by strategically complying with the changing requisites of Bretton Woods institutions and Western aid donors. Using the aid machinery and the whole state apparatus to their benefit, Frelimo controls politics and national businesses.
The massive discovery of natural resources during the second decade of the twenty-first century—coal in the central province of Tete and natural gas in Cabo Delgado—translated into a period of fast economic growth driven by foreign direct investment. For the Frelimo elite, relying on coal and gas extractivism meant the possibility of ceasing dependence on international aid. The prospects for increased revenues stimulated the expansion of public debt, including a two-billion-dollar deal secretly sealed by Guebuza for purchasing military and surveillance equipment. Following the ‘hidden debt’ scandal, Bretton Woods institutions suspended their support to the state budget. Natural gas revenues did not flow as expected, and the country sunk in deep economic recession. There is no sign of light at the end of the tunnel.
Crisis is the hallmark of the administration of Filipe Nyusi (2015-2025). Frelimo’s attempt to switch from international aid rents towards rents generated by natural resource extractivism failed. Joao Feijó and Aslak Orre recap that extractivism in Mozambique has been historically instigated by foreign investment but invariably carried out with local rentier elites. Emblematic for Mozambique is the fact that the state grants tax incentives and ensures public guarantees for private debt to attract foreign direct investment and make extractive projects financially viable for domestic capitalists. In words of Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco, the Mozambican state gives away strategic natural resources at low cost.
Cabo Delgado is the textbook case of extractivism within Mozambique. The historically “cursed” region by its abundance in natural resources experiences a boom of extractivism for more than a decade. Deposits of natural gas were discovered in 2010 and graphite begun to be extracted by multinational companies in 2017. Graphite is used in batteries and solar panels; hence, its demand is expected to rise as the energy transition advances in the Global North.
High expectations of access to increased natural resource rents and “creeping authoritarianism” precipitated the resumption of the armed conflict with Renamo in 2013. A new peace accord was signed in 2019. By the time peace talks were under way, in 2017, a new war emerged in Cabo Delgado: the third war. Cabo Delgado was the main site of the liberation war. The Mueda Massacre (Northwest of Cabo Delgado), where the Portuguese fired on a crowd demonstrating for independence in 1960, was central to the establishment and consolidation of the Frelimo guerrilla. Cabo Delgado was also a battlefield of the civil war. The region witnessed a high percentage of the total casualties.
Violence made it to the international news when Al-Shabab (the youth) militias attacked the town of Palma in March 2021. Palma served as a base of operations for French TotalEnergies in the construction of a liquefied natural gas plant aimed at facilitating the transportation of Mozambican gas to Europe. The attack resulted in more than one thousand people killed including dozens of contractors. TotalEnergies halted the construction of the plant. Tacitly admitting that it could not provide protection for foreign investment, the Mozambican government turned for military help to the Southern African Mission in Mozambique of the Southern Africa Development Community and to Rwandan armed forces, as a result of an agreement with France and Rwanda.
In an effort to shed light on the origins and the persistence of the third war in Cabo Delgado, Liazzat Bonate, Paolo Israel and Carmeliza Rosario argue that international jihadism became linked with local grievances such as poverty and unemployment and perceived discrimination, exclusion and state violence linked to religious and ethnic identities. In trying to regain control of the territory, the Mozambican armed forces have committed human right violations. Attacks of Al-Shabab continue in Cabo Delgado. The return of TotalEnergies through the provision of a pacified territory seems like another empty promise at the end of Nyusi’s administration.
This historical perspective describes the structural conditions that frame the stage in which the current political crisis takes place and might or might not be solved. It underscores the configuration that regulates the relationship between state and society through state’s allocation of rent generated by natural resource extractivism. In general, rentier politics creates clientelist and patronage networks with sectors of society and co-opts oppositional forces, which might explain Frelimo’s electoral success. In particular, the Mozambican rentier state benefits local elites by transferring state resources to private pockets.
Pedro Alarcón is a Global Forum Democracy and Development (GFDD) research fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance of the University of Cape Town. Alarcón has held guest professor positions and fellowships in Europe, Latin America and South Africa. His research lies at the crossroads of climate change, energy, and society. Regions/countries of interest: Southern Africa, Andean countries, the Philippines
https://globalforum.ceu.edu/pedro-alarcon/