Though the alleged widespread voter-fraud of Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela is widely-discussed (as is the people’s revolt against it), it is hardly the only nation to have dealt with this problem. Such things are also well-documented in Africa. The recent case of Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony on the east coast of Africa, is worth considering. It has a political and social history similar to that of many countries on the continent—a history of hope, disillusion, oppression, repression, corruption, and incompetence.
In 1960, Harold MacMillan, the British Conservative prime minister, gave a famous speech in Cape Town called the “winds of change speech.” In that speech, he made clear that London was going to renounce the Empire and join the Commonwealth. This speech was the signal that Europeans would soon be saying goodbye to their possessions in Africa. The France of the Fifth Republic and General De Gaulle would do the same in French Colonial Africa, the Dutch had already done so, and the Spanish had only a relic of Moroccan possessions.
The struggle for independence
But the Portuguese prime minister, António de Oliveira Salazar, resisted the wave of decolonization. Portugal had been the pioneer of overseas navigations and conquests and, unlike the English and Dutch who had essentially dedicated themselves to the economic exploitation of the territories, the Portuguese, in addition to trade, had “exported the State.” In other words, they had been concerned from a very early stage with the political-administrative grid and had carried out the occupation and settlement of Brazil, even promoting ‘mixed’ marriages in Goa.
Salazar was convinced that without the colonies Portugal would be a very weak state in Europe, with its independence at risk. That’s why he defended them, forcing the independence movements into war.
The war began in Angola in 1961, spread to Guinea-Bissau in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964. In Mozambique, the independence movement was called FRELIMO, created in 1962 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, under the patronage of Julius Nyerere. FRELIMO did not win militarily but, like the other movements in the Portuguese colonies, it received power from Lisbon when, on April 25, 1974, a group of officers carried out a coup d’état to end the war.
In FRELIMO, the relatively moderate Eduardo Mondlane had been assassinated in February 1969 and replaced by the radical populist Samora Machel. During the war, FRELIMO was mainly supported by Mao Zedong’s China and heavily influenced by Beijing’s Marxist-Leninist model. Thus, starting after independence on June 25, 1975, it followed a line of radical communism. This was characterized by fierce repressions for dissent, persecution of Christian and Muslim religious communities, and even concentration camps to detain all suspects and outcasts according to Marxist-Leninist logic. Uria Simango, vice president of FRELIMO; his wife; and other non-FRELIMO independents died in these camps. The 250,000 Portuguese settlers in Mozambique were expelled and the companies nationalized, as made sense in a regime that prided itself on Marxism-Leninism.
50 years of FRELIMO
From here came the rebellion of RENAMO—Mozambique’s National Resistance. The rebellion was initially supported by the Rhodesians and South Africans. It spread throughout the country and forced the FRELIMO government to negotiate peace with RENAMO leader Afonso Dhlakama in the Rome Accords of October 4, 1992. From then on, a democracy was theoretically established in the country, but FRELIMO always managed to win the elections, following the methods of Venezuelan chavismo.
Dhlakama died and was replaced by Usufo Momade at the head of the party, but FRELIMO kept winning elections. At the same time, economic and social life deteriorated, and today Mozambique is among the 10 poorest countries in Africa. This is despite the fact that, at the beginning of the 21st century, important natural gas reserves were discovered along the northern coast of Cabo Delgado in the far north of the country. However, since 2017, this region has been the target of attacks by jihadist groups that have made it impossible for major oil companies such as France’s Total and the U.S.’s Exxon-Mobil to operate.
It was against this backdrop that the presidential and parliamentary elections took place on October 9 of this year. President Filipe Nyusi, having served two terms, was constitutionally unable to stand for re-election, and so FRELIMO presented Daniel Chapo, an almost unknown lawyer who has been governor of Inhambane province since 2019, as its presidential candidate. Everything was running in parallel to the election in Venezuela: a left-wing government, installed and immovable since independence, despite the discontent and degradation of the country, but which manipulates the election results.
The candidates in the October 9 elections were Daniel Francisco Chapo, for FRELIMO; Lutero Simango son of Uria Simango for the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM); Ossufo Momade for RENAMO; and Venâncio Mondlane supported by the Democratic Alliance Coalition (CAD).
In an election in which abstention (56.5%) was the biggest factor, Chapo was declared the winner with 70% of the vote, Mondlane second with 20%, Momade third with 6% and Simango last with 3%. But Mondlane (who is grand-nephew of Eduardo Mondlane) didn’t accept this and went into open and public opposition to the results and to FRELIMO.
Things got worse when two of the candidate’s close collaborators, Elvino Dias and Paulo Guambe, were murdered in Maputo, in an attack that was to have Venâncio Mondlane himself as its target.
Venâncio’s Mondlane’s revolt
Then, fearing for his life, Venâncio clandestinely left the country. He was in South Africa, then possibly in Malawi (whose president is an evangelical theologian of the same faith and church as Mondlane). His location is currently hidden for security reasons.
Venâncio Mondlane is a true political phenomenon, a man who, practically alone, has been confronting a regime that has ruled his country for half a century.
He was born in 1974 in Lichinga (Vila Cabral, in colonial times). He is a forestry engineer by training; in 2019 he was the MDM’s candidate in the elections for the city council of Maputo, the country’s capital, where he got 42% of the vote, and then joined RENAMO. In 2023 he ran again for Maputo City Council, lost, didn’t accept the results and kept up street protests by his supporters indefinitely.
In the meantime, he left RENAMO.
This time he is following the same process, only from a distance, on social media. The leader of the popular resistance, a tribune of the first rank, he never stops inciting his compatriots to bring the country to a standstill, being followed and obeyed by a significant part of the population, especially young people and teenagers. In this way, the movement of popular opinion is growing, in the face of a power that appears to have no strategy, oscillating between repression, absence, and tolerance; not least because it seems to be unsure of the loyalty of the military and police forces. Here and there, they have fired on the demonstrators and, so far, there have been more than 250 deaths.
The demonstrators are not being gentle either, and in some towns, they have stormed and burned FRELIMO party headquarters and police stations. On the other hand, they have occupied the streets and blocked the entrances, interrupting traffic with South Africa.
The resulting paralysis of economic activity has led the Confederation of Economic Associations of Mozambique to ask the president of the Republic not only to provide military escorts for civilian trucks, but also to urgently negotiate a truce with Venâncio Mondlane until an agreement is reached on the elections.
Officially, between October 21 and December 11, 110 people were killed as a result of the demonstrations. The number included some police officers.
The Street Revolt
However, violence broke out again on December 23rd when the Constitutional Council announced the results of the presidential election, confirming the victory of Daniel Chapo, even if with a slight correction on his share of the vote—from 70.67% to 65.17%, with the difference attributed to Venâncio Mondlane, raising his share from 20.32% to 24.19%.
These updates did not appease the people’s anger; instead, the amended results seem to have doubled it. Violence has continued, not only in Maputo but also throughout the center and the north, in Beira and Nampula. Casualties have increased, totaling 261 deaths as of December 27. So, in past few days, there have been more victims than in the prior two months.
To add to the already chaotic situation, there were massive breakouts from three or four prisons, including the high security prison near Maputo, from which 1,500 criminals escaped. According to reliable sources, their escape was facilitated and provoked by the guards. Some of the recaptured were killed.
Mondlane’s appeal was successful because the majority of Mozambicans are desperate. Like any formerly colonized people, at independence they were subjected to intense propaganda, which promised that with political independence would come a better life. Instead, they have experienced extreme sufferings: first with the civil war, then with a profoundly corrupt government. There is also widespread drug trafficking and regular kidnappings of businessmen and members of their families, a threat that even hangs over senior security and police officials.
Speaking to Agencia Ecclesia, a Catholic news media, Father Tony Neves, of the congregation of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit, used the term “institutionalization of anarchy,” saying that “the people are desperate, the country has not been developed, the lords of the system have become unbearably rich (…) Now the people have no more fear and take to the streets to protest against what they consider to have been a fraudulent election.”
Also, the Ordem dos Advogados, the bar association of Mozambique, condemned in severe terms the way the authorities dealt with the escapees of Machava Central Prison, as some of those recaptured were slaughtered. They said that the authorities were “criminal” and “disgusting,” a symbol a “sick society” where leaders have completely lost their authority. This powerful language illustrates that not only the people in the street but also the middle and upper middle classes are ready to speak out against corruption.
Many personalities linked to political life and to FRELIMO have criticized the lack of strategy on the part of the ruling party. It is also known that important figures in the ruling party have criticized the party and Nyusi discreetly and have noted the party’s isolation from the country, especially the youth. Some have left the country, expecting the worst. And significantly, President João Lourenço of Angola, at the opening of the 8th Extraordinary Congress of the MPLA in Luanda, called on the Mozambican government and opposition to find a peaceful solution.
Mozambique—The Roots of Violence
TOPSHOT – Protesters gather next to a burning barricade in Maputo on December 23, 2024.
Mozambique’s highest court confirmed Monday the ruling party’s victory in a disputed October vote after allegations of rigging triggered weeks of deadly street clashes. Fears are high that more violence could break out in the southern African nation after the opposition threatened to call an uprising following the decision.
(Photo by Amilton Neves / AFP)
Though the alleged widespread voter-fraud of Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela is widely-discussed (as is the people’s revolt against it), it is hardly the only nation to have dealt with this problem. Such things are also well-documented in Africa. The recent case of Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony on the east coast of Africa, is worth considering. It has a political and social history similar to that of many countries on the continent—a history of hope, disillusion, oppression, repression, corruption, and incompetence.
In 1960, Harold MacMillan, the British Conservative prime minister, gave a famous speech in Cape Town called the “winds of change speech.” In that speech, he made clear that London was going to renounce the Empire and join the Commonwealth. This speech was the signal that Europeans would soon be saying goodbye to their possessions in Africa. The France of the Fifth Republic and General De Gaulle would do the same in French Colonial Africa, the Dutch had already done so, and the Spanish had only a relic of Moroccan possessions.
The struggle for independence
But the Portuguese prime minister, António de Oliveira Salazar, resisted the wave of decolonization. Portugal had been the pioneer of overseas navigations and conquests and, unlike the English and Dutch who had essentially dedicated themselves to the economic exploitation of the territories, the Portuguese, in addition to trade, had “exported the State.” In other words, they had been concerned from a very early stage with the political-administrative grid and had carried out the occupation and settlement of Brazil, even promoting ‘mixed’ marriages in Goa.
Salazar was convinced that without the colonies Portugal would be a very weak state in Europe, with its independence at risk. That’s why he defended them, forcing the independence movements into war.
The war began in Angola in 1961, spread to Guinea-Bissau in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964. In Mozambique, the independence movement was called FRELIMO, created in 1962 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, under the patronage of Julius Nyerere. FRELIMO did not win militarily but, like the other movements in the Portuguese colonies, it received power from Lisbon when, on April 25, 1974, a group of officers carried out a coup d’état to end the war.
In FRELIMO, the relatively moderate Eduardo Mondlane had been assassinated in February 1969 and replaced by the radical populist Samora Machel. During the war, FRELIMO was mainly supported by Mao Zedong’s China and heavily influenced by Beijing’s Marxist-Leninist model. Thus, starting after independence on June 25, 1975, it followed a line of radical communism. This was characterized by fierce repressions for dissent, persecution of Christian and Muslim religious communities, and even concentration camps to detain all suspects and outcasts according to Marxist-Leninist logic. Uria Simango, vice president of FRELIMO; his wife; and other non-FRELIMO independents died in these camps. The 250,000 Portuguese settlers in Mozambique were expelled and the companies nationalized, as made sense in a regime that prided itself on Marxism-Leninism.
50 years of FRELIMO
From here came the rebellion of RENAMO—Mozambique’s National Resistance. The rebellion was initially supported by the Rhodesians and South Africans. It spread throughout the country and forced the FRELIMO government to negotiate peace with RENAMO leader Afonso Dhlakama in the Rome Accords of October 4, 1992. From then on, a democracy was theoretically established in the country, but FRELIMO always managed to win the elections, following the methods of Venezuelan chavismo.
Dhlakama died and was replaced by Usufo Momade at the head of the party, but FRELIMO kept winning elections. At the same time, economic and social life deteriorated, and today Mozambique is among the 10 poorest countries in Africa. This is despite the fact that, at the beginning of the 21st century, important natural gas reserves were discovered along the northern coast of Cabo Delgado in the far north of the country. However, since 2017, this region has been the target of attacks by jihadist groups that have made it impossible for major oil companies such as France’s Total and the U.S.’s Exxon-Mobil to operate.
It was against this backdrop that the presidential and parliamentary elections took place on October 9 of this year. President Filipe Nyusi, having served two terms, was constitutionally unable to stand for re-election, and so FRELIMO presented Daniel Chapo, an almost unknown lawyer who has been governor of Inhambane province since 2019, as its presidential candidate. Everything was running in parallel to the election in Venezuela: a left-wing government, installed and immovable since independence, despite the discontent and degradation of the country, but which manipulates the election results.
The candidates in the October 9 elections were Daniel Francisco Chapo, for FRELIMO; Lutero Simango son of Uria Simango for the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM); Ossufo Momade for RENAMO; and Venâncio Mondlane supported by the Democratic Alliance Coalition (CAD).
In an election in which abstention (56.5%) was the biggest factor, Chapo was declared the winner with 70% of the vote, Mondlane second with 20%, Momade third with 6% and Simango last with 3%. But Mondlane (who is grand-nephew of Eduardo Mondlane) didn’t accept this and went into open and public opposition to the results and to FRELIMO.
Things got worse when two of the candidate’s close collaborators, Elvino Dias and Paulo Guambe, were murdered in Maputo, in an attack that was to have Venâncio Mondlane himself as its target.
Venâncio’s Mondlane’s revolt
Then, fearing for his life, Venâncio clandestinely left the country. He was in South Africa, then possibly in Malawi (whose president is an evangelical theologian of the same faith and church as Mondlane). His location is currently hidden for security reasons.
Venâncio Mondlane is a true political phenomenon, a man who, practically alone, has been confronting a regime that has ruled his country for half a century.
He was born in 1974 in Lichinga (Vila Cabral, in colonial times). He is a forestry engineer by training; in 2019 he was the MDM’s candidate in the elections for the city council of Maputo, the country’s capital, where he got 42% of the vote, and then joined RENAMO. In 2023 he ran again for Maputo City Council, lost, didn’t accept the results and kept up street protests by his supporters indefinitely.
In the meantime, he left RENAMO.
This time he is following the same process, only from a distance, on social media. The leader of the popular resistance, a tribune of the first rank, he never stops inciting his compatriots to bring the country to a standstill, being followed and obeyed by a significant part of the population, especially young people and teenagers. In this way, the movement of popular opinion is growing, in the face of a power that appears to have no strategy, oscillating between repression, absence, and tolerance; not least because it seems to be unsure of the loyalty of the military and police forces. Here and there, they have fired on the demonstrators and, so far, there have been more than 250 deaths.
The demonstrators are not being gentle either, and in some towns, they have stormed and burned FRELIMO party headquarters and police stations. On the other hand, they have occupied the streets and blocked the entrances, interrupting traffic with South Africa.
The resulting paralysis of economic activity has led the Confederation of Economic Associations of Mozambique to ask the president of the Republic not only to provide military escorts for civilian trucks, but also to urgently negotiate a truce with Venâncio Mondlane until an agreement is reached on the elections.
Officially, between October 21 and December 11, 110 people were killed as a result of the demonstrations. The number included some police officers.
The Street Revolt
However, violence broke out again on December 23rd when the Constitutional Council announced the results of the presidential election, confirming the victory of Daniel Chapo, even if with a slight correction on his share of the vote—from 70.67% to 65.17%, with the difference attributed to Venâncio Mondlane, raising his share from 20.32% to 24.19%.
These updates did not appease the people’s anger; instead, the amended results seem to have doubled it. Violence has continued, not only in Maputo but also throughout the center and the north, in Beira and Nampula. Casualties have increased, totaling 261 deaths as of December 27. So, in past few days, there have been more victims than in the prior two months.
To add to the already chaotic situation, there were massive breakouts from three or four prisons, including the high security prison near Maputo, from which 1,500 criminals escaped. According to reliable sources, their escape was facilitated and provoked by the guards. Some of the recaptured were killed.
Mondlane’s appeal was successful because the majority of Mozambicans are desperate. Like any formerly colonized people, at independence they were subjected to intense propaganda, which promised that with political independence would come a better life. Instead, they have experienced extreme sufferings: first with the civil war, then with a profoundly corrupt government. There is also widespread drug trafficking and regular kidnappings of businessmen and members of their families, a threat that even hangs over senior security and police officials.
Speaking to Agencia Ecclesia, a Catholic news media, Father Tony Neves, of the congregation of the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit, used the term “institutionalization of anarchy,” saying that “the people are desperate, the country has not been developed, the lords of the system have become unbearably rich (…) Now the people have no more fear and take to the streets to protest against what they consider to have been a fraudulent election.”
Also, the Ordem dos Advogados, the bar association of Mozambique, condemned in severe terms the way the authorities dealt with the escapees of Machava Central Prison, as some of those recaptured were slaughtered. They said that the authorities were “criminal” and “disgusting,” a symbol a “sick society” where leaders have completely lost their authority. This powerful language illustrates that not only the people in the street but also the middle and upper middle classes are ready to speak out against corruption.
Many personalities linked to political life and to FRELIMO have criticized the lack of strategy on the part of the ruling party. It is also known that important figures in the ruling party have criticized the party and Nyusi discreetly and have noted the party’s isolation from the country, especially the youth. Some have left the country, expecting the worst. And significantly, President João Lourenço of Angola, at the opening of the 8th Extraordinary Congress of the MPLA in Luanda, called on the Mozambican government and opposition to find a peaceful solution.
READ NEXT
Our New Year Message: No Surrender
Free Speech: What Are They Afraid Of?
The Virtue That Enables All Others: A Conversation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali