The next president’s ear

Good afternoon. The appearance of former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza at Eduardo Mondlane University this week, where he gave a rather unoriginal and unimpressive speech (see below), is a reminder of how many forces within ruling party Frelimo have come out of the shadows to engage in the election campaign. It is almost as though there are several Frelimo election campaigns happening instead of one. Frelimo is more of a loose confederation of warring tribes than a unified party, and one of those tribes is the faction led by Guebuza.

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Guebuza has already been very prominent in this campaign, so much so that he has been annoying the aides of Daniel Chapo, Frelimo’s presidential candidate. One of his first interventions was not a straightforward endorsement of Chapo, but more a congratulation of him for endorsing Guebuza’s past policy of district-led economic development. He has also spoken up in defence of his “seven million” initiative, another Guebuza-era policy supported by Chapo, under which loans were provided to launch business projects. The fact that this policy was a fiscal disaster under Guebuza, that the programme was captured by corrupt Frelimo interests and that 90% of the loans were never repaid, does not seem to concern either of them. The ex-president has even defended his government’s creation of the so-called “hidden debts” or “tuna bond” projects, an act of economic devastation that, as we have argued before, he needs to take much of the blame for.