Good afternoon. “We are prohibited from failing”, President Daniel Chapo said yesterday at a conference to mark 50 years since Mozambique gained independence from Portugal. He was talking about the so-called “inclusive national dialogue”, the talks between himself and opposition parties on political and constitutional reforms. But the anniversary, and the speeches given about it this week by Chapo and one of his predecessors, offer an opportunity to reflect more broadly on the government of the country, and on just why Chapo thinks that failure is not allowed.
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In another speech yesterday (see below), Joaquim Chissano, president of Mozambique from 1986 to 2005, namechecked some of modern Mozambique’s most obvious problems, such as poverty, corruption and violent extremism, but offered no explanation for how those problems had come about or why they have not been addressed more effectively. His claim that Mozambique currently enjoys democratic institutions and freedom of expression rings hollow after the extensive fraud in last year’s elections and the killing shortly afterwards of opposition activists Elvino Dias and Paulo Guambe.
Fast-forward to today, and Chapo has found it necessary to carry out something of a revolution in the machinery of the state. The replacement of the police leadership seems to have coincided with a more effective response to kidnappings, as we noted yesterday. The heads of the tax and customs services have also been replaced, in what could be the start of a wide-ranging crackdown on corruption in public officials. Corrupt judges have also started to fall. A new approach to rescuing the loss-making state-owned airline LAM is underway, and the scrapping of its international routes looks set to save money.
