Weekly newspaper Savana - out every Friday - has a rumour column on its back page, called 'Diz-se... Diz-se' - taking a sideways and often cryptic look at current events in Mozambique. It's well worth reading but can be hard to decipher. Here we translate this week's edition - and provide an explanation, where we are able, of the cryptic elements.
This edition of 'Diz-Se' is free for anyone to read - but become a Plural Media member to get it every week
A black week for Moza diplomacy when the country needs international solidarity like bread for the mouth. Divergences over CD led the minister of the brothers-in-law to say, “Silencing the guns in these situations requires dealing with the root causes of conflicts, which invariably includes governance deficits, human rights abuses and contestation over resources.” Twenty-four hours later, the head of diplomacy of the Europeans united in Brussels told his peers that there has been a mission of specialists in security matters waiting for the green light from Mozambique since November. And then he went on the attack: “"We cannot say that everything that is happening in Mozambique is a simple extension of the so-called Islamic terrorist movement. To a certain extent that is true. But the armed violence in the northern part of Mozambique was triggered by poverty and inequality and by the population of the area losing respect for a state which could not provide it with what it needed.” We’re waiting for explanations from the guitarist government spokesman about what type of help the country needs...
PM: CD = Cabo Delgado. Brothers-in-law = South Africans (since Nelson Mandela married Graca Machel). The EU’s top diplomat is Josep Borrel, whose “sharp and non-diplomatic” words for Mozambique are quoted — along with South African foreign minister Naledi Pandor’s — at greater length by Joseph Hanlon’s newsletter this week, available here. Both interventions were indeed serious embarrassments for Mozambique, at a time when, as Savana says, Mozambique needs all the international help it can get. But Frelimo is unwilling to accept blame for failing to improve economic opportunity in Cabo Delgado since it won independence 45 years ago.
And in the aftermath of a pitiable ‘shopping list’ taken to Gaborone, with clarifications given by the macomrade counterpart, it’s become clear that the engineer wasn’t at the summit of the regional club at the end of November because of procedural questions. He had them informed that he had other things to do, and sent a delegate to represent him. Which didn’t please his peers who aired their discontent in the press. Lies, so they say, have short legs.
PM: The ‘macomrade counterpart’ is Zimbabwean president Emerson Mnangagwa. As discussed ad nauseam in recent issues of Diz-Se and The Week in Mozambique, Filipe Nyusi didn’t go to a SADC summit in Gaborone in late November, which has caused controversy — with some saying he should’ve gone, and his supporters saying he was right not to.
Auspicious news reaches us from the world of diplomacy, of a former Mozambican diplomat who is now an advisor to one of the most odious dictators in the continent swimming in oil. Nothing new given that, in the past, the liberators served as consular representatives to the Asian dictatorship that oppressed our allies in Timor-Leste.
PM: Isaac Murargy, a former chief of staff of President Joaqium Chissano, is now an advisor to President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, we understand. His daughter Eliana got married earlier this month to one of the president’s sons, Pastor Hassan Obiang Mangue. Liberation war veteran General Americo Mfumo was honorary consul for Indonesia in Mozambique, at a time when Indonesia’s dictatorial regime was brutally oppressing East Timor.
From the land of the gringos, the imperfect electoral democracy has finished, confirming Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President and Vice President elected by universal suffrage on 3 November. Note for the new members of the CNE: to banish doubts from the heads of Trump and his supporters, in the six states where there were accusations of fraud, votes were recounted manually three times. Three times
PM: Mozambique’s election governing body, the CNE, has a new make-up (the selection of whom represented ‘another nail in the coffin of democracy’, according to the front cover of Savana this week). The CNE has become increasingly passive in the face of increasing evidence of electoral fraud in Mozambique’s young democracy; the US might not have much to teach the world about democracy these days, but a willingness to recount would be one example to follow.
Elsewhere, someone who's running serious risks of not renewing his mandate is the Mayor of Chimoio, given the competence he's demonstrating in running that city, which must be worrying the reactionary sectors of his party. This week the city on the plateau received 11 big machines that should make Chimoio the cleanest city in the country: container carriers, a compactor, cement trucks, dumper trucks, street sweeping trucks, a machine for boreholes and a concrete mixing plant. There's work going on up there…
PM: João Ferreira, the mayor of Chimoio, has been an example of good municipal management since he was elected in 2018 — and risks putting most other members of Mozambique’s government, from the Presidency right down to district administrators, to shame by putting his constituents’ interests above his own. Worth keeping an eye on whether Frelimo let him run for re-election in 2023. The precedent of Eneas Comiche in Maputo, who was deselected in 2013 after a term of competent management, does not bode well. (Comiche’s successor is now facing trial for corruption, while Comiche is finally back for a second term as mayor.)
It’s not clear whether it’s part of the current campaign against the media or not, but the boss who’s known for putting insurance in line has just instructed the insurance companies to publish their annual reports in the official daily of ex-Joaquim Lapa, a practice also followed by the banks under the watchful eye of the sheriff of the smoking pistols. Hopefully someone will come forward and say it’s not true, that banks and insurers are free to publish their reports in the country’s main publications. The freedom of the press is not only not throttling the scribes.
PM: Financial institutions are required by law to publish their annual reports in the press. Usually this is taken to mean they have to publish in the most widely-read paper, generally held to be the state-owned Notícias — probably true, given its far superior distribution network compared to the other papers. It’s a virtuous circle for Notícias which gets to bill the banks (and state-owned companies) for multiple pages when they publish their reports, helping it to maintain its dominant position in the market. But Savana says that in actual fact, companies can choose among Mozambique’s main publications when it comes to publishing their accounts. There’s more to freedom of the press than just not pressurising journalists — independent publishing houses need to be able to thrive.
And someone who’s being clearly persecuted, against a backdrop of investigations regarding CD, is Tom Bowker, the correspondent of Zitamar. He had his correspondent card revoked on 8 December, in an apparently unprecedented action. Gabinfo is demanding registration, but Zitamar, which is British, is not registered in Great Britain, because there they simply don’t register the media. Result: card cancelled and a 20/24 of bad memory.
PM: Declaration of interest: Tom Bowker is not only Zitamar’s correspondent but also a Plural Media partner and editor. Gabinfo is the media regulator Gabinete de Informação. Joseph Hanlon wrote a good summary of the situation in his most recent newsletter. 20/24 is a reference to when, on independence, Portuguese colonists were given 24 hours to pack up to 20kg of luggage and get out of Mozambique. However, Tom Bowker has not been expelled.
There’s a contradiction when it’s said that liquid reserves have grown above seven months, but at the same time the metical is suffering so many jolts versus the greenback. Can anyone explain the phenomenon?
PM: The metical has been weakening against global currencies of late, but at the same time the central bank’s reserves of foreign exchange have grown to above seven months’ worth of imports. It’s not clear why this should be contradictory, unless you take the view that the Bank of Mozambique should be using its FX reserves to support the metical. We won’t get into a discussion of exchange rate dynamics here, but it’s worth noting that the reserves-to-imports ratio could have improved not just because of an increase in reserves, but also due to a reduction in imports which has been one of the symptoms of the general slowdown in economic activity this pandemic year.
At the rate we’re going, all that’s left is for the noisy nursery to start passing laws at dawn, so secret is the legislative process becoming. That’s what happens when institutions are reduced to the image in the mirror.
PM: The noisy nursery is parliament, which finally selected the members of the CNE late in the evening after much horse-trading.
From CD and from Afungi, covid-19 is on the loose again in the gas encampments — which means someone got distracted in the procedures adopted in April, when the peninsula became home to the biggest outbreak in the country.
PM: CD = Cabo Delgado, Afungi is the peninsula where the LNG project is taking place. It was ground zero for Mozambique’s first significant covid-19 outbreak back in April, and apparently has another outbreak now — though official data on Friday put active cases in the whole of Cabo Delgado at just four.
Whisper it
Comrade Bernardino is hoping to give a big Christmas present to Mozambicans by the end of the year, ensuring that Mocímboa da Praia is rescued from the Islamic State terrorists. We’re doing our best from this side…
PM: Comrade Bernardino is police chief Bernardino Rafael. Do the Mozambican forces have a major offensive planned over the next 10 days, to retake the symbolically and strategically important port town of Mocímboa da Praia?