Mozambique president Filipe Nyusi has vested interest in keeping Manuel Chang out of a US court

For Mozambique’s president Filipe Nyusi, it is evidently vital to keep the country’s former finance minister Manuel Chang out of a United States (US) courtroom. Hence Maputo’s dogged attempts to ensure Chang is extradited from South Africa — where he has now been in jail for nearly four years — to Mozambique rather than the US. 

Both countries ostensibly want him to face bribery, corruption and other charges arising from Mozambique’s $2-billion ‘hidden debts’ scandal dating back to 2013. 

Since Chang’s arrest in Johannesburg in December 2018 on a US warrant, Maputo has harried Chang through several legal and political twists and turns. Two successive South African justice ministers have ordered Chang returned to Mozambique. But twice, the Johannesburg high court has stopped them, upholding the objections of the Budget Monitoring Forum, a consortium of Mozambican non-governmental watchdogs who contend that Chang won’t face real justice in Mozambique. 

Last November, the high court ordered Chang extradited to the US and then denied the Mozambique government leave to appeal the decision. Maputo then applied to the Constitutional Court, but that motion was denied in June this year. Maputo did not give up. It appealed directly to the Supreme Court of Appeal, which is now deciding whether or not to hear the appeal.

Chang’s lawyer Rudi Krause was asked after the Constitutional Court decision if his client had any more legal options. He replied that “Mr Chang has resigned himself to the fact that he will be tried in the USA, a country that has no jurisdiction over a crime he did not commit.”

A story published by Africa Confidential this week suggests that Chang is not only resigned to being extradited to the US but would prefer that to being sent home. The journal says attempts have been made against his life while in jail in South Africa, and he fears he will be ‘silenced’ if he returns to Maputo. According to Africa Confidential, Chang has notified the Supreme Court of Appeal that he ‘unequivocally’ consents to a US extradition — a claim Krause denies.

The article conjectures that Maputo and Chang have almost reached the end of the legal road and that he will soon be en route to New York. Another lawyer who has been involved in the case is not so sure, suggesting to ISS Today that there could be more twists and turns in the long legal saga. 

Borges Nhamirre, a Maputo-based Researcher for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), cannot see why Chang would prefer to be extradited to the US over Maputo, or why he would fear being silenced back home. He says, “Chang was a faithful servant of the state” and the ruling party, the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), for many years. And he notes that Frelimo and the state have looked after Chang, paying his legal bills and buying a house for his family. 

Far from being silenced says Nhamirre, if extradited to Maputo, Chang would more likely “escape justice — that is, be subject to a sham trial and sentenced to a lenient prison term.” Although 19 individuals, including some senior officials, have been tried for the “hidden debts” scandal, “the top politicians — those who decided to contract the debt and hide it from Parliament – are escaping justice.”