Good afternoon. President Daniel Chapo is in Eswatini this week, adding it to the list of countries he has visited since his inauguration in January. Previously he has paid a visit to South Africa, Angola, Malawi and Tanzania.
Although Chapo has kept airports reasonably busy, he would no doubt be grateful for a few more official invitations, for example from Western European countries and from the European Union (EU). Both have traditionally been visited by Mozambican presidents, especially Portugal.
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Tom Gould
But the word from diplomatic missions in Maputo is that many foreign countries are still hesitant to embrace Chapo as the legitimate president of Mozambique, which an invitation would imply. They have not forgotten the extensive vote-rigging surrounding his election last year, which was comprehensively detailed in the final report of the EU’s monitoring mission (not that the EU took any action in response), or the bloody police crackdown on protesters that left over 300 of them dead. So reluctant were foreign governments, even in Africa, to recognise Chapo afterwards that only two foreign heads of state, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa and Guinea-Bissau’s Umaro Sissoco Embaló, attended his heavily guarded inauguration.
