Mozambique on the Edge

On January 9, when Venâncio Mondlane stepped off the plane in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, he was returning to a changed nation. In October 2024 he had stood as the opposition candidate in disputed presidential elections; he fled to South Africa only a few weeks later, after his lawyer was gunned down along with a top official in the party supporting his campaign.

Since the day of the vote, some three hundred people have been killed amid mass protests that veered into destruction, most of them shot by the police. From early on, many of Mondlane’s supporters had resorted to protesting by “panelaço”—making noise with a “big frying pan” from the safety of their kitchens. But the violence had only escalated since his departure. Crowds had blocked roads, disrupted railways, and destroyed infrastructure at Ressano Garcia, a busy border crossing with South Africa. The blogger Albino José Sibia, aka Mano Shottas, was killed by the police as he livestreamed their clashes with protesters; police later attacked mourners at his funeral, killing two and shooting another streamer. In Maputo authorities ran over an unarmed woman with an armored car and used a helicopter to drop teargas on a neighborhood.

The basic rationale for the upheaval is simple. Frelimo, the only governing party Mozambique has known since winning independence from Portugal in 1975, had falsified the elections. A partial catalogue of measures it deployed reads like the index of a book on election fraud: the party registered hundreds of thousands of nonexistent “ghost” voters that in parts of the country exceeded the total population of adults, forced civil servants to campaign and make donations, refused to admit or credential observers, illegally selected and bribed polling staff and trainers, failed to use legally required transparent ballot boxes, placed extra ink marks on opposition ballots, distributed pre-filled and multiple ballots to allies, delayed counts, forged and withheld results sheets.¹

Mozambique has lived through waves of protest and repression before, including after elections. In each case Frelimo made narrow concessions and retained power, waiting for the unrest to recede until the next cycle. But there are signs that this time may be different. Historically protests have been loudest in opposition strongholds far from the capital—though in recent years, as Frelimo lost support among urban youth, blockades and rallies had popped up in Maputo too. This time the clanging of pots and pans echoed through Maputo neighborhoods home to entrepreneurs and civil servants, perhaps the party’s most reliable constituency. In Gaza province, where Frelimo has won some of its most lopsided electoral victories, high schoolers joined their teachers in a protest over late paychecks—and succeeded in getting them paid.

As demonstrations spread and intensified throughout November, Mondlane cheered on the momentum through Facebook Live broadcasts from South Africa. The protesters did not heed his call for nonviolence: they set fire to police stations, Frelimo offices, and cadres’ homes. The list of targets expanded to reflect longstanding grievances: a Chinese-owned factory where a local government official demanded bribes for each new hire, a water utility that charged excessive rates, the offices of a national park whose administrators have feuded with small-scale gold miners, a state electrical utility that had failed to extend promised connections to two thousand homes. 

The British researcher Joseph Hanlon, a prominent gadfly and chronicler of current events in Mozambique going back decades, pointed out just how quickly foreign mining and gas companies reacted to the threat the protests posed to their share prices, vowing to make good on broken promises like funding a bridge (Kenmare), or providing farmland (TotalEnergies) for local communities. South32—an Australian firm that lost $1.5 billion in shareholder value as protesters blocked trucks carrying alumina to its smelter—moved to renegotiate a hydroelectric power contract with the state.² But this is only tinkering at the edges: Mozambique remains one of the poorest countries in the world, where indices of corruption and inequality have long been moving in the wrong direction. What Mozambicans are calling for is a new social contract, a goal that would take years to achieve even under the best circumstances.

Frelimo, a portmanteau for Mozambique Liberation Front, has its origins as the guerrilla army that overthrew colonial rule. For sixteen years following independence,  it fought a wrenching civil war with Resistencia Nacional de Moçambique (Renamo), an insurgency that drew support from segregationist white governments in neighboring South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as from the US, which saw Mozambique as another front in the global fight against communism. The war left more than a million people dead and displaced roughly a third of the population. The young Marxists who took up arms back then are now rich old men with opaque interests in foreign-owned megaprojects (gas, coal, graphite, gemstones), state contracts, and timber concessions. The Mozambican term for this is cabritismo, or “goatism,” from the adage that a goat eats where it is tied. 

For a long time the approach was compatible both with near-double-digit GDP growth and with support from the donor countries that underwrote social programs and a significant share of the state budget. But it hasn’t built an inclusive economy. In a country where 70 percent of people make a living in agriculture, nearly half the rural population still lacks access to safe drinking water, two thirds are without sanitation beyond dirt latrines, and only 11 percent have electricity. Though access to education has expanded and poverty has declined since the desperate postwar years, inequality has increased sharply. In the past three decades only the top 10 percent of earners have seen their share of the economic pie grow. In 2012 Renamo’s longtime leader, Afonso Dhlakama, barnstormed the countryside with a simple appeal to the then-president, Armando Guebuza, who left office as one of the country’s wealthiest men: “You are eating well,” he said. “We want to eat well, too.” 

Part of Frelimo’s longevity owes to its leaders’ ability to keep their disagreements behind closed doors: they sparingly punish top officials for their excesses, and do not break ranks. A number of crises have tested this equilibrium but never quite broken it. The most significant today are an Islamist insurgency and a secret debt crisis. In 2013–2014 Frelimo officials signed off on more than $2 billion in illegal loans to companies tied to Guebuza’s allies. Two years later, when the loans were revealed, the IMF, the World Bank, and the so-called G14 group of donors—the UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, and a host of European countries—withdrew their support for the state budget for the first time. (The US endorsed the other donors’ decision, but opted only to “review” its own aid.) Mozambique defaulted on payments as debt service outstripped GDP; economic growth fell by half; inflation surged. The only official ultimately convicted of conspiracy for his role in the scheme, the former finance minister Manuel Chang, was tried in New York City, after Frelimo spent years fighting his extradition.

Around the same time, a ragtag Islamist militia was taking shape along the Tanzanian border in Cabo Delgado province, where anger was rising over a pair of offshore-gas projects led by ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies, with investments projected at some $50 billion. The insurgency grew in size and sophistication, with fighters blocking roads and carrying out gruesome attacks across thousands of square miles. It eventually matured into ISM, or “Islamic State Mozambique,” an ISIS affiliate that seized whole towns and forced the suspension of natural gas exploration.

In 2021 the government—its own police and military outmatched—brought in troops from Rwanda, who managed to stabilize things enough to persuade both companies to return. Nevertheless both projects remain in flux, and Mozambican leaders seem to have learned nothing from the experience. Only a few weeks ago Daniel Chapo, the Frelimo candidate who defeated Mondlane, called the post-election protests a “continuation of the terrorist attacks in Cabo Delgado.” This is true only to the extent that you define “terrorist attacks” as threats to Frelimo’s continued dominance and enrichment.

The opposition, meanwhile, has failed to coalesce around a strategy bigger than the appeal of its latest charismatic leader. In 1999 Dhlakama narrowly lost to the incumbent, Joaquim Chissano, in a contest marked by a large discrepancy between the number of votes cast for parliament and for president. (Since voters place ballots for each race in separate boxes, the excess of president-only votes suggested an illegal effort to put Chissano over the top; no observers reported voters dropping ballots in only one box. The tabulation was done in secret and full results were never published.) Dhlakama sought a recount, and over the next year he led a boycott of parliament as well as protests that devolved into violent clashes with police. He forced direct negotiations with Chissano but ultimately abandoned the talks without securing concrete commitments. 

Renamo never came close to repeating that performance. In subsequent votes—in 2004, 2008, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2018, 2019, and 2023—Frelimo padded its margins both by manipulating the voting apparatus and through subtle regulatory changes. In 2013 Renamo leaders went back to the bush, where they staged sporadic ambushes, but the party’s electoral leverage waned along with its capacity to threaten a return to civil war. International observers criticized successive Frelimo governments without pushing for sanctions. Important backers have been content to maintain their support, as long as Frelimo proves a willing partner for international capital. The sharpest response from donor countries followed falsified loans, not falsified ballots. At the same time, the symbiosis between Frelimo and the Bretton Woods institutions has also constrained its ability to outflank populist challengers like Mondlane: if the money to fund social programs comes from a coalition that takes its cues from the IMF and the World Bank, there’s a limit to how generous the state can be, or how sharply officials can challenge the operating margins of foreign corporations.

There are signs that Mondlane could fall prey to the same factional rivalries that have historically derailed the opposition. A former banker and television commentator, he is handsome and charismatic, with a smile made for political posters. In 2013 he ran for mayor of Maputo on the ticket of Movimento Democratico de Moçambique (MDM), which had briefly supplanted Renamo as the leading opposition party. Though a longshot candidate, he won 40 percent of the vote—an outcome so promising that it may have doomed his future chances by stifling the support of fellow opposition leaders, who nurtured their own presidential aspirations.

In 2015 he joined MDM’s delegation in parliament, maintaining a sideline as a Pentecostal preacher, but he left the party three years later amid disagreements with its founder. That fall he was barred from standing as a Renamo mayoral candidate in Maputo on a technicality; he ran again in 2023 and is widely believed to have won, though a Frelimo candidate got the job. Last year, as it became clear that Renamo’s leaders weren’t interested in seeing Mondlane run for president, he left again and founded his own party, Coligação Aliança Democrática (CAD). When CAD was declared ineligible for the October presidential election—authorities cited “irregularities” in the party’s registration, which had previously been approved—Mondlane forged an agreement with Podemos, a smaller party founded by former Frelimo members.

His return to the country in January came at a pivotal moment, just as the new parliament and president were to be sworn in. The final results, announced before Christmas, reflected a tacit admission of fraud and a gesture toward compromise. In October electoral authorities said that Frelimo had won three quarters of the parliamentary vote, which would have allowed it to amend the constitution unilaterally. Then, after two months of violent policing failed to halt the protests and unrest, without explaining why, the Constitutional Council shaved 6 percent off Frelimo’s vote total and stripped it of twenty-six seats. 

Frelimo undoubtedly hoped that these concessions would dissipate the energy in the street. But upon his arrival Mondlane insisted that he would not strike deals that would secure his safety or sideline him as the protests’ figurehead. At the airport he had held up a Bible and declared that the people rather than the electoral authorities had chosen him as the rightful president. The question is how far he’ll go to test that conviction. “My return does not result from any political agreement,” he told reporters. “My return is a unilateral decision to be in Mozambique.” As if to underline the point, police teargassed a group of his supporters who had gathered at the airport. 

Within days of Chapo’s inauguration, Mondlane submitted a list of demands to the government, including the release of five thousand arrested protesters and free medical care for those injured by police. For the sake of the country, he then vowed to pause large-scale demonstrations for the new administration’s first hundred days. Podemos delegates, meanwhile, went ahead and took their seats in parliament, where the party will gain significant funding as the second-largest caucus. In February Chapo announced that he’d reached a compromise with four opposition parties—without Mondlane’s involvement. 

Chapo has promised yet-to-be-specified electoral reforms, which has given Mondlane a kind of dejà-vu: “He’s a young man with the posture, decisions, thinking, and vision of an old man,” he told Deutsche Welle. (He added, in the same breath, that Chapo, who is forty-eight, “looks like a grandfather.”) In February Mondlane returned to the streets, leading smaller crowds who were met again by the hard edge of police power. 

Earlier this month Mondlane once again fled Mozambique in fear for his life, only to return a few weeks later. Last weekend he met privately with Chapo and posed for a public handshake, before proclaiming that his rival had agreed to some of his previous demands—to end police violence, free jailed protesters, and compensate those injured by authorities. Chapo hasn’t yet commented on the specifics of any agreement, saying only that it was a “good meeting that will help stabilize Mozambique.” Mondlane stopped short of calling Chapo “president” or admitting defeat—in a Facebook post he referred to him only as “head of government”—but the detente gives him a path to staying in Mozambique to negotiate another day. 

Protests, meanwhile, have continued to simmer with only vague connections to the election. All week, minibus operators in Gaza province blocked roads to protest the bribes demanded by traffic police. It’s the kind of frustration even Mondlane may not be able to extinguish. But for now each side appears to sense the limits of their leverage. Chapo has seen that repression alone won’t dispel the people’s anger, and perhaps Mondlane sees he can’t build much of a movement from beyond the borders of the country he hopes to lead.