Good afternoon. It is too early to know how significant last night’s meeting was between President Daniel Chapo and opposition politician Venâncio Mondlane. Initial public reaction seems to have been positive, but no major demonstrations were anticipated in Maputo this morning anyway, so it is hard to tell if the news has made any difference to the atmosphere on the streets.
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Tom Gould
In order to bring an end to the current political crisis, there will have to be more meetings and they will have to lead to an agreement. Mondlane did have a phone call with Chapo’s outgoing predecessor Filipe Nyusi after the nationwide demonstrations began, but it did not lead to anything.
It is significant, however, that the meeting has happened at all. It did not come out of nowhere — as this newsletter has noted before, there has been a back channel of communication between Chapo and Mondlane for some time, though it has taken months to result in a meeting. Neither was the meeting inevitable. In recent weeks, the government, including Chapo himself, has given the impression of preferring to ignore Mondlane or simply dismiss him as a criminal for instigating protests that have often turned violent.
