The unseen forces of Mozambique's polycrisis: Corruption, climate, and the struggle for power

24 Feb 2025

The current chaotic situation in Mozambique unequivocally signals the urgent need for structural change in the country. A radical shift in Frelimo’s approach to power is central and imperative.

Mozambique seems to be diving deep into what has been termed a “polycrisis”. The country is faced with a combination of interdependent crises, with each one exacerbating the others.

These entanglements mean that none of these systemic issues can be addressed in isolation. Different forms of political instability and conflicts have dominated the political context in the country.

Socially, poverty, corruption and inequality have led to further social divisions and intermittent protests in the major cities.

Environmentally, Mozambique has experienced a succession of unprecedented impacts of climate-change induced disasters, with severe cyclones being the most common ones. But how are these crises interrelated?

For nearly a decade now, Mozambique has been regularly attracting the attention of major global media outlets. Prior to that, the little attention the country received was related to famine and devastating floods.

But things have changed now. This change is a new dynamic for a country once perceived as marginal. Even during the Cold War, Mozambique was never really regarded as a strategic partner, either by its ally, the Soviet Union, or by the Western bloc.

Unlike Angola, for example, Mozambique was never a de facto battleground state. Its non-strategic importance for the Soviet Union due to its own type of socialism and openness to work with all forces of the socialist world, was also evident in its failed bid to join the Comecon (The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) in the early 1980s.

Angola, by contrast, was a relevant state. Despite not being a full member of Comecon, in 1986 Angola received support for educational and training programmes.

Well-articulated liberation project

As a liberation movement, Frelimo was capable of successfully uniting a deeply socially heterogeneous society into a well-articulated liberation project. When the country gained independence in 1975, the very same project that had hitherto united the country emerged as a source of deep societal division for various reasons, internal and external.

Internally, the project of building a prosperous nation was/is to be carried out by a much-centralised and authoritarian regime, the single-party state. Externally, the authoritarian and centralised nature of the very state that Frelimo inherited was adopted in the postcolonial context.

After nearly 50 years of independence, neither of these two factors have been fully abandoned. In fact, centralism and authoritarianism have become a determinant for the reproduction and survival of Frelimo.

While constitutionally since 1990 Mozambique is no longer a single-party state, in practice Frelimo’s dominance has never been in question. Frelimo’s approach to power is that of a complete rejection of any other actor than itself at all social and political domains in the country.

Colonial Mozambique prevented the birth of a native bourgeoisie. The post-independent socialist-inspired Mozambique did the same, but as an attempt to establish an egalitarian society. This was to have important implications in the pseudo nature of the post-independence bourgeoisie.

The transition from a single-party state to a multiparty system coincided (or had to be accompanied) with the transition from a socialist-inspired centralised economy into a neoliberal economy. Because there was no real bourgeoisie, “comrades” had to be artificially transformed into businessmen.

In this transformation, capitalism was expected to reduce the new businesspeople’s appetite for political power and turn their focus on accumulating wealth — it simply did not.

Under Frelimo in the new multiparty political system — whose power began to be increasingly challenged by the new kids on the bloc, especially Renamo — the state was and remains the only source of wealth.

Confronted with the increasing risk of losing control of its exclusive source of wealth posed by democracy, Frelimo corrupted electoral institutions and imposed limits to political liberties, leading to successive political crises. These crises have materialised in various forms, including armed conflicts, targeted political assassinations, and now violent public demonstrations.

Pseudo-bourgeoisie

The pseudo-bourgeoisie relies almost entirely on the state. It is almost impossible to identify a relevant businessperson with no links to the state and to the ruling party. A state with very limited resources available became a space of struggle for economic and social status, operated through corrupt schemes at all levels.

The control of the state by a highly corrupt elite has resulted in persistent poverty and socioeconomic marginalisation. In 2016, for example, a revelation of a $2-billion state-guaranteed hidden loan (of which, among others, $500-million remains nowhere to be found) exposed how deeply entrenched corruption is within the ruling elite.

This hidden loan was contracted by the ruling elite in anticipation of the gains from multimillion-dollar natural gas investments in northern Mozambique by the French giant, Total Energies.

To protect its extractivist investments through forms of imperial and sub-imperial arrangements, as suggested by Patrick Bond, more violence is being inflicted on the population living near the gas areas. The same gas that exacerbated the ruling elite’s corruption and land grabs contributes to the climate change crisis that results in extreme cyclonic events that regularly affect the country, especially the poor and marginalised.

The poor and marginalised are made vulnerable to disasters because they were forced to reside in vulnerable peripheries by conflicts, inequality and persistent poverty.

The discovery of the $2-billion hidden loan and corruption case and the government’s initial unwillingness to investigate it, led to donors that contribute a quarter of the total national budget suspending further loan payments to the country.

This suspension pushed Mozambique almost to bankruptcy, a condition in which it had to face the catastrophic impact of Cyclones Idai and Kenneth in 2019. Between 1950 and 2018 the country had already experienced the impact of more than 90 tropical cyclones. In 2023, it was hit by Cyclone Freddy (Freddy is the first-ever category five tropical cyclone to accumulate a record amount of energy and sustain itself for an entire month). In the past three months alone, Mozambique has already been affected by two devastating cyclones, Chido and Dikeledi.

The cumulative effects of corruption, climate-change induced cyclones and the Covid-19 pandemic has been a sharp increase in poverty. In the past years, multidimensional poverty has worsened. The proportion of poor households has risen from 71% to 78.3%. In rural areas, more than 95% of households are in poverty. Urban households also saw a sharp increase in multidimensional poverty, from 32% to 46%.

The boom in the extractive sector further exacerbated rural poverty as well as a need among the ruling elite to tighten its grip on the state (to access highly profitable mineral concessions or dividends), leading into a further narrowing of the political space.

Poverty, corruption, inequality, total political exclusion, authoritarianism and extractivism have sharply increased the sense of economic, cultural and political marginalisation that have resulted in the emergence of a new form of violence — Islamic extremism — in the gas-rich northern part of the country.

Unprecedented levels of violence

This context has also provided the people in other rural and urban settings with the anger they needed to violently respond to the fraudulent 2023 local, and now 2024 national, electoral results, with the unprecedented levels of violence that we currently observe.

The demonstrations that started in October 2024 have been brutally quelled by the government, having resulted in more than 300 deaths, and thousands of people being injured and jailed.

Politically, they have produced two competing governments. There is a de jure government led by Frelimo, which controls the security apparatus and the official institution, and a de facto one, under the centre-right charismatic opposition leader, Venâncio Mondlane. Mondlane has the people with him.

The current chaotic situation in Mozambique unequivocally signals the urgent need for structural changes in the country. A radical shift in Frelimo’s approach to power is central and imperative.

The political dimension of the country’s polycrisis can only be resolved if Frelimo accepts political inclusion and recognises the necessity of liberating the state and the economy from its own control through effective democracy.

Economically, Mozambique must move away from its increasing focus on the extractive economy. Extractivism further increases the country’s vulnerability to climate-change induced disasters and produces other negative implications, such as elite corruption, social marginalisation, and conflicts. DM

Dr Fredson Guilengue works as a Senior Regional Programme Manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Southern Africa. He holds a Ph.D in Development Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand.

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Well-articulated liberation project