Good afternoon. How many police officers does Mozambique have? The Ministry of the Interior is not going to tell you. The overall number of police officers and the number in each formation is deemed to be a state secret. As is well known, this opacity has been exploited by senior police commanders to embezzle money through the creation of so-called ghost employees, whose pay they pocket.
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It also means that there is uncertainty over how many police need to be recruited, an issue that has resurfaced now that the interior ministry has announced a new recruitment campaign for the Mozambican police, aiming to recruit 4,000 officers in four months (see below). Whether this is too many or not is hard to say, but anecdotal evidence suggests that there are parts of Mozambique which have too many police and parts which have too few. While in Maputo and some southern towns, police can be seen swarming around and patrolling in groups of three, in rural districts in the north and the cities of Pemba and Nampula, police can feel absent.
