Samora Machel with FRELIMO troops during the Mozambican War of Independence. Photo: Wikipedia.
By Paris Yeros – Jan 3, 2025
The October 2024 elections in Mozambique followed the well-known destabilization script against a party with an anti-imperialist history in power. The script begins with a climate of denunciation of fraud previously cultivated by an “opposition” aligned with imperialism and progresses through an outbreak of violence and murders of unknown authorship across the electoral period, the counting of votes officially and by the opposition on its own account, the rejection by the opposition of the official result, the rejection of the electoral commission and the constitutional court, the call for a post-election protest, the spontaneous taking to the streets of a lumpenized working class, leading to the destruction of properties and public buildings, ending with police repression and more deaths. In the case of Mozambique, it is estimated that around 250 people have already died in this electoral episode.
FRELIMO, the national liberation party in power since 1975, is no stranger to destabilisation. Its struggle against Portuguese colonialism, which ran parallel to the liberation struggles in Southern Africa against colonialism – in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) and South Africa – was followed by a devastating civil war against RENAMO, a guerrilla group organised and supported by the segregationist regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa precisely to prevent FRELIMO from consolidating sovereignty in its hands.
The experience of destabilization against liberation movements is etched in the memory of the peoples of the region. The same dynamic convulsed Angola for more than two decades after independence, by means of internal war between the MPLA, the liberation party that took power in 1975, and UNITA, a party transformed into a proxy force in the service of apartheid South Africa and NATO. The same would have happened in Zimbabwe, if ZANU, newly in power in 1980, had not nipped in the bud an armed rebellion in 1983 that threatened its own sovereignty, which nonetheless did not spare the country of a traumatic experience right at the beginning of the transition. And it was the same colonial intransigence that plunged South Africa, the epicenter of colonial power in the region, into ferocious violence against the liberation movement led by the ANC, until the final agreement of 1993 and the first elections the following year.
Mozambique, together with the region, travelled a long and arduous path to independence, the scars of which remain open. It is worth noting that the peace agreement in Zimbabwe was signed in 1987 and continues to this day, but the country is under sanctions and constant destabilization due to its land reform and its open confrontation with imperialism. In Mozambique, an agreement signed in 1992 did not maintain the firm adherence of RENAMO, relapsing into bouts of violence until the most recent agreement in 2019. Angola had to wait until 2002 for a peace agreement. Namibia, occupied by apartheid South Africa, gained independence belatedly in 1990, under the leadership of SWAPO, in the final stretch of transition negotiations in South Africa itself. All of these parties traveled this path together and remain in power to this day, and all face interference from imperialism, especially during election times. After all, the exercise of universal suffrage, conquered by the liberation movements themselves against imperialism and colonialism, has today become a weapon in the arsenal of imperialism.
It does not matter that all the national liberation parties in the region fell into the clutches of neoliberalism. In fact, the region’s independence itself was conditioned on the acceptance of economic opening, facilitated at that time by the fall of the Soviet Union. The “pact” of neocolonial transition was a “pact” of neoliberal transition in a phase of general war fatigue and changes in the relation of forces on a global scale. Of course, much can be said about the internal constitution and ideological commitments of the liberation movements, whose official grammar in all these cases was Marxism-Leninism. Embourgeoisement eventually found its way. However, such an analysis cannot ignore imperialism, which mobilized its forces installed in the region to wage a general war lasting thirty years, followed by civil wars. Its objective remains the same today: to remove, one by one, the liberation parties that still have an organic relationship with the liberation struggles and, above all, to dismantle the mutual defense pact established in 2003, which seeks to shield the region (the Southern African Development Community, SADC) from military interference. This is the concrete reality of Southern Africa in the twenty-first century.
The case of Mozambique has an aggravating factor. Its neocolonial transition, even though it sustained high rates of economic growth on the back of Western investments in mineral and energy resources, did not guarantee national integration, nor even territorial integrity. The recurring regression into internal armed conflict in the central and northern provinces kept alive the threat of a semi-colonial imbroglio, with external intervention in part of the national territory. As if the armed actions of RENAMO elements until 2019 were not enough, another conflict also broke out in the north, in 2017, in the province of Cabo Delgado, now led by Islamic fundamentalist forces inspired by Salafi jihadism. In 2019, they officially allied themselves to ISIS. It is estimated that one million people, almost half of the province’s population, had to abandon their homes and dislocate internally and to neighboring countries. The loss of control over part of the province to salafi-jihadist forces, especially the part linked to the weighty investments of France and the United States in natural gas exploration, exceeded the defense capacities of the Mozambican army. The government belatedly and reluctantly sought military aid from SADC, but also from Rwanda, the former being self-financed and with limited resources, the latter being financed by the European Union.
Mozambique thus succumbed to the general framework of imperialist military interference whose main focus in the region to date has been the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The contradictions continue to widen. It is worth remembering that the DRC was the immediate cause of the construction of a regional mutual defense pact after the attempted seizure of power in Kinshasa by Rwanda and Uganda, in the second civil war in the DRC that began in 1997, with the military, financial and logistical support of the United States. The invasion coming from the eastern border, and aiming to cross the entire country to the Atlantic coast, defined what was at stake in Southern Africa after its liberation: the reestablishment of a client state in the DRC, precisely there where one of the main pillars of the geostrategy of the United States and its European partners had been built during the Cold War. The invasion was seen as an existential threat to the region and was responded to by an ad hoc intervention by the armed forces of Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe to block the advance of US sponsored troops.
It is worth adding to this regional dynamic that, although Angola had more immediate strategic interests in the DRC conflict, due to the shared border and the history of cross-border action by armed groups, the ideological driving force at that time for building unity for regional defense was the government of Zimbabwe. The intervention in the Congo came in the wake of Zimbabwe’s abandonment of its IMF agreements and became a key element of the re-radicalization of its liberation movement, which culminated in 2000 in the largest agrarian reform in the world in decades, with the expropriation of more than 80% of the agricultural lands still in the hands of Rhodesian settlers. Although the region maintained a higher level of sovereignty in strategic matters, the Zimbabwean rebellion still had further impact on the region’s neoliberal and neocolonial pact. The introduction of punitive economic and military sanctions against this country has traversed this entire period and made it difficult for Zimbabwe to maintain a more active role in military matters, including in Mozambique. It was reported in the press that the Mozambican government had expressed a preference for a bilateral agreement with the Zimbabwean government to combat the insurgency in Cabo Delgado. However, whether due to the wear and tear of twenty years of sanctions or the commitment to collective solutions, it was SADC that took the lead, alongside Rwanda, which in turn presents a new complication given its direct involvement in the DRC to date.
One final observation is necessary to understand the challenge posed to Mozambique, as to so many other countries. The massive and bold outpouring of youth onto the streets is an omnipresent, permanent, and uncontrollable reality. In relation to Mozambique specifically, the post-electoral mobilization has been interpreted in at least two ways, both of which are insufficient. One laments the “impatience” of youth with the processes of economic and political development. The other celebrates the “protagonism” of youth in the “class struggle”. What has transpired, strictly speaking, is neither impatience nor class struggle. The fact is that contemporary imperialism is marked by the enormous building up of labor reserves that it currently concentrates in the countries of the South. One of its main characteristics is constant insurrectional pressure, which, unlike in previous eras, lacks today the political forces capable of directing it. The labor reserves in Africa also concentrate the bulk of the youth, which already constitutes two-thirds of the continent’s population. Thus, it is not just impatience, if by this is meant impatience with the current economic model. Nor is it class struggle: not everything that involves the working people is class struggle, to say the obvious. The constant insurrections in Mozambique, including those led by RENAMO and the Salafists in Cabo Delgado, and even the current ones in urban areas under the leadership of a pastor-politician who, overnight, became the leader of a rebellion, are the raw material of imperialism. The challenge is to reverse the situation by changing economic course, which, despite everything that has gone on, only the liberation parties and their ideological heirs can still achieve.
