Protests have rocked Mozambique since ‘preliminary’ results of presidential and legislative elections held on 9 October declared the ruling Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo) the winner. Mozambique can be added to the growing rollcall of neocolonial countries where the population has taken to the streets in open revolt. Since 2018, the masses have shaken the ruling classes to their core in Sudan, Chile, Lebanon, Iraq, Myanmar, Eswatini, Iran, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and now Mozambique.
In a daring move independent presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane declared himself “president elect” ahead of the results announcement, condemning the election as rigged. His candidacy was supported by the new Optimist Party for the Development of Mozambique (PODEMOS), also contesting national elections for the first time. Mondlane and PODEMOS ran a joint campaign under the slogans “Save Mozambique – this country is ours!” and “Power to the people!”. Huge crowds turned out for Mondlane’s vibrant nationwide tour. Railing against the despotism of the Frelimo regime and the failure of the political and economic elite to develop the country, the charismatic Mondlane has become a lightning rod for the deep anger and frustration felt in society.
The National Elections Commission’s (CNE) 24 October ‘preliminary’ results gave Frelimo 70% of the vote and Mondlane and PODEMOS second place with only 20%. There is no doubt this significantly undercounts their real support. Electoral fraud appears to have reached new levels in these elections. Polling station results were altered, party representatives of opposition parties barred from observing counts and approaching one million ‘ghost voters’ appeared on the rolls. In the days before the CNE’s results announcement, PODEMOS’s party lawyer, Elvino Dias, and Paulo Guambe, a PODEMOS official, both leading a legal challenge to the countless election irregularities, were assassinated.
In response to the CNE’s announcement, and clearly with their lives in danger, Mondlane and the PODEMOS leadership called for nationwide protests. “I feel that there is a revolutionary atmosphere…”, Mondlane told journalists. There was a mass response with protests taking place in towns and cities across the country. The capital, Maputo, was at the epicentre, with huge crowds from working class areas joining the protests. Spearheaded by young people, roads have been barricaded with burning tyres. Road freight entering the country has been attacked forcing episodic closures of border posts by neighbouring governments. Footage on social media shows health workers marching, and, in Maputo, a march of the Muslim community, suggesting, significantly, that willingness to oppose Frelimo and reject the rigged election results cuts across regional, tribal and religious divisions.
State forces have responded brutally, attacking protesters with tear gas and live ammunition. One journalist described Mozambique’s cities as having been turned into “battlegrounds”. In some cases helicopters were used to attack protesters. State forces also attacked journalists and the internet has been repeatedly shutdown. At least thirty protesters have been killed, many more injured, and hundreds have been arrested.
Frelimo
Frelimo came to power in 1975 as the leader of the guerrilla struggle against Portuguese colonialism. From 1977 it ruled Mozambique as a one-party state, albeit one that initially enjoyed massive popular support and allowed some forms of democratic participation. While claiming to be ‘Marxist-Leninist’ Frelimo’s rule had very little to do with the early, pre-Stalin, period of the 1917 October revolution in Russia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist states between 1989 and 1991 the already privileged Frelimo leadership turned towards capitalism and enriching themselves. Multiparty elections were allowed from 1994 but the Frelimo leaders kept their grip. Since then, Frelimo has ruled as a pliant neoliberal neocolonial government, following the dictates of global financial institutions such as the IMF, and the imperialist powers behind them, in exchange for aid.
Mozambique remains one of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries on the planet. Poverty has soared over the past decade, affecting 65% of the population by 2022. On this economic foundation corruption and cronyism has become entrenched and reached eyewatering levels. Even the aid that is meant to underpin the state budget evaporates into thin air. Public sector workers, including teachers, health workers and even judges have threatened strike action over unpaid salaries.
The development of coastal gas fields by multinational energy companies over the last decade created expectations that living standards would soon be transformed. Instead, for the vast majority of Mozambicans life became harder. This provoked an insurgency in the far north of the country in the areas adjacent to the gas fields, centred on communities excluded from development and recruiting young people excluded from job opportunities. A regional military intervention has failed to end the insurgency as the CWI warned at the time. In the ensuing fighting 3,000+ have died and nearly a million have been displaced, deepening the sense of crisis in the country.
As the political, economic and social crises of Mozambican capitalism have deepened support for Frelimo has collapsed. Its electoral majorities have become less and less credible. After thirty years of ever more brazen electoral fraud and escalating repression against political opponents, wide sections of the population now refuse to accept the results.
Whilst Frelimo has monopolised government for the past fifty years, the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) has monopolised the opposition. Renamo waged a guerrilla campaign in the 1970s and 1980s to undermine Frelimo’s social base by destabilising its rule as part of the Cold War in the region. Renamo was backed and armed by the white-minority regimes in Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe) and South Africa, and behind them the imperialist powers and the United States in particular. Despite the end of the Cold War Mozambican politics remained dominated by the Frelimo-Renamo conflict even after the introduction of multiparty elections. That is finally being shattered. Even the CNE’s (disputed) election results have Renamo plummeting to less than 6% of the vote, displaced as the main opposition party by PODEMOS.
Shifts
Protests in the aftermath of Mozambican elections are nothing new. What is new however is the shift in the social forces involved in them. In the past, in what had become a ritualistic pantomime, Renamo would threaten to “return to the bush” and resume its rural-based guerrilla war, pulling-back from the threat when Frelimo offered sufficient financial sweeteners to accept the results.
Driving the 2024 protests are the young people of the major towns and cities, especially the capital Maputo. A majority of the population is under sixteen years of age and 80% are under the age of thirty-five. The youth in the urban areas are not the subsistence farmers and peasants of previous generations. These youth have more education and through the spread of the internet and cell phones are also more connected with each other and informed about events elsewhere in the country, the region and the world. They aspire to a different future to their parents and grandparents and see the old political elite as the chief obstacle to it. Frelimo has a dim awareness of the shifting social sands eroding their rule. But its attempt to signal a generational change by standing Daniel Chopo, its first presidential candidate born after independence, was too little, too late.
The question of work and income in the face of mass youth unemployment and underemployment is central. Despite more young people having qualifications, many struggle to survive by hustling and huckstering in the informal sector. The role models for many in this generation are the ‘self-made’ musicians, rappers, prophets, pastors and other celebrities, who simultaneously present themselves as successful businesspeople and ‘entrepreneurs’. A general expectation for ‘social advancement’ through decent waged or salaried jobs stands alongside and blends into demands for greater support for small businesses and ‘entrepreneurs’. Enter Venâncio Mondlane.
Mondlane & PODEMOS
Before running for president Mondlane was already a popular ‘celebrity’ radio and television host and Christian pastor claiming a background in business and investment. He has been described as a “promiscuous politician” with some justification. Mondlane first stood as a candidate at local level for a small opposition party before jumping ship to Renamo and serving a term as an MP. He broke links with Renamo when his ambition to lead the party was blocked. In the 2024 elections Mondlane stood as an independent candidate only after a coalition of smaller parties declined to nominate him.
PODEMOS developed out of a split from Frelimo in Maputo in a dispute over who should head its 2018 local elections list in the city. A younger section of the membership backed an initiative to invite Samora Machel Jnr. to head Frelimo’s list as its mayoral candidate. Machel is the son of the popularly remembered leader of Frelimo’s guerrilla war against Portuguese colonialism and the first president of independent Mozambique. What was sought, according to PODEMOS’s eventual founders, were his “personal qualities of … integrity, humility, incorruptibility, among others demonstrated over time…”.
However, the determination of PODEMOS’s founders to adopt Machel was not driven solely by principle. The collapse in support for Frelimo in Maputo, combined with the jealous gatekeeping of lucrative but dwindling public positions by the Frelimo old-guard was becoming an absolute barrier to their political ambitions. The initial hope was that the decline in support for Frelimo could be halted by adopting Machel as mayoral candidate. When this was blocked PODEMOS’s founders then waged a campaign within Frelimo to overturn the decision, only breaking away to support Machel’s independent candidacy when this was defeated. Ultimately, the courts were used to ensure Machel never appeared on the ballot and the 2018 local elections were marred by fraud, repression and violence. After linking-up with other youth formations and ‘civil society’ and ‘non-governmental’ organisations, PODEMOS was founded the following year.
When it comes to a program to end Frelimo’s authoritarian rule and transform living standards in Mozambique, Mondlane and PODEMOS fail to move much beyond slogans. In PODEMOS’s election manifesto the solution to almost every problem facing the country is given as political “decentralisation” and the “renegotiation of contracts with multinationals”. Given the depth of Mozambican capitalism’s political, economic and social crises this does not sufficiently answer how the state will be democratised and the authoritarian Frelimo political elite removed, nor how poverty and unemployment will be ended, education, healthcare and infrastructure developed, the problems of the rural population solved, or how plundering by the multinationals will be ended and peace and security achieved.
Ultimately, the capitalist economic foundations of Mozambique need to be ended. This will require the nationalisation of the gas fields and other key natural resources under democratic control. It will also require the nationalisation of the banking and financial sector, linked to the refusal to pay the $22 billion national debt (100+% of GDP) that imperialist exploitation and Frelimo’s mismanagement, corruption and looting has burdened the country with. This would still only be a start, but combined with democratic economic planning it would begin to make available the resources to create jobs and develop Mozambique, as well as laying the foundations for ending the insurgency in the north.
Struggle Continues
Facing little choice, Mondlane is now in Sweden after surviving an assassination attempt in neighbouring South Africa. But he remains resolute, continuing to call for protests via social media and these calls are continuing to get a response. Albino Forquilha, the leader of PODEMOS, has also continued calls for mass demonstrations and has publicly rejected the idea of a “government of national unity”.
The Frelimo regime continues to up the stakes. Protests are being described by ministers as acts of “subversion and terrorism”, denounced as an attempted coup and being linked to the insurgency in the north. This is to create an atmosphere in which the army can be fully deployed to suppress the protests. This intimidation has had some impact. Mondlane’s call for a three-day protest and general strike for 13-15 November, which would include marches in all provincial capitals, and, Mondlane boasted, see four million on the streets in Maputo, failed to get a massive response, although protests did take place.
Debate and discussion on the way forward will be taking place amongst the activists who have initiated and placed themselves at the head of the protests. The movement will be strengthened and these discussions enriched through the development of mass democratic structures that can include more of those supportive of the protests in communities, workplaces, schools etc. These structures could perhaps take the form of community-based struggle committees where decisions can be made about the way forward, including tactics, the timing of protests and the demands being made. To strengthen the coordination and impact of protests these would have to link up. For struggle committees to come into existence and develop they will need to be defended from the repression of state forces through the organisation of self-defence.
The protest movement also needs to discuss and debate the program and policies needed to place society under the genuine democratic control of the vast majority. Mozambique’s political, economic and social crises must be solved in the interests of workers, poor people and the youth and not the ruling elite or any of its factions or aspirant factions. This will inevitably require debate and discussion about the leaders and political vehicle needed to implement such a programme.
Hopes for a better future in Mozambique have been projected onto the idea of Mondlane winning the presidency. For most it is enough to know that he is opposed to Frelimo stealing another election. Many will be drawing courage from his defiant stand. However, Mondlane’s record is of a man looking for a political vehicle to fulfil his considerable personal ambitions. He has a messianic determination to ‘lead’, believing this will fulfil a prophecy made by Nigerian ‘prosperity prophet’ and televangelist Joshua Iginla, to whom his own church is linked. Mondlane has used and discarded several political parties to build his national political profile. He also appears to be sympathetic to the claims of right-wing populists, including US president-elect Donald Trump, ex-Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and the Chega party in Portugal, that they speak for the forgotten and downtrodden in their countries. However, the pro-capitalist neoliberal programs of the far-right populists are completely incapable of solving the problems of the working class, the poor and the youth. This adds greater importance to the protest movement developing mass democratic structures as a safeguard against any individual using the movement as a stepping stone for their own ends or to implement a program against the interests of the majority in Mozambique.
The political crisis is far from over. The ruling class appears uncertain on the way forward. The election results remain ‘preliminary’ until the Constitutional Council (CC) – Mozambique’s electoral and constitutional court – validates the results passed to it by the CNE. Normally, this would be a mere formality. However, the CC has postponed a decision until 15 December. It has even timidly raised the possibility that the results could be annulled. This is a manoeuvre to keep the ruling class’s options open. It also reveals their lack of confidence. Whether the CC risks validating the results next month will depend entirely on mass protests continuing and being strengthened through building working class based organisations and having a clear plan of action. A genuinely socialist programme is necessary for a Mozambique free of all authoritarianism and in which poverty and unemployment are banished.
