– The risk of an “Arab Spring” spreading to sub-Saharan African countries is a phenomenon that the Mozambican government has found difficult to deal with
By João Feijó, Sociologist
The social situation of the urban youth
If after the 16-year war the Household Budget Surveys recorded a decrease in the poverty rate (from 69.7% in 1996 to 46.1% in 2014), the last decade has seen the opposite cycle, rising to 62.8% (in 2019/20) and reaching 65% in 2022. Structural factors have contributed to this scenario (an economically poorly integrated country, reduced investment in agriculture and support for the family sector, deteriorating infrastructure, fragility in institutions and public services and endemic corruption), aggravated by various internal and external shocks, such as the hidden debts scandal and the interruption of support for the state budget, extreme weather events, or armed conflicts in central and northern Mozambique.
In a scenario where majority of the population continues to make a living from agriculture, an old-regime demographic structure persists, with a fertility rate of 5.6 children per woman, albeit lower in urban areas (3.6). The National Statistics Institute (INE) predicts that the population will increase to around 38.6 million in 2030 and 49.1 million in 2040. The high birth rates contribute to a fairly young population structure. In 2027, 26.5% of the population (around 10 million individuals) will be between 5 and 14 years old, increasing the need for public spending on education in a country largely in debt and decreasing its quality. Young people between the ages of 15 and 29 will make up 29.2% of the population (around 11.6 million individuals), putting enormous pressure on the labor market. More qualified than their parents, a large proportion of urban youth have developed legitimate expectations of employment and social advancement, but the solutions found are based on precarious self-employment. In a of scenario slower economic growth, the increase in population is not absorbed by the economy, so the absolute number of poor people will continue to rise, as will the number of urban lumpen surviving in the informal sector of the economy.
It is against this backdrop that the concept of waithood has become commonplace, referring to a young population who, having already reached adulthood, are still waiting to become adults in terms of what it means to be an adult: having a professional occupation and an income and, from there, the conditions for consumption and social reproduction. The urban informal sector is now made up of young people who are better qualified and better informed, with higher social expectations and a more demanding political culture, constituting urban time bombs. Over the last 15 years, widespread urban riots or threats thereof have become regular phenomena, transforming the country’s main cities into socially seismic territories.
Turning a blind eye: the governmental answer
Although the term neo-liberalism is often used to characterize the Mozambican economy, the system is far from being based on liberal and meritocratic logics, which promote competition and efficiency. An administration of a patrimonial and clientelist nature is consolidated, where the ruling elites flourish economically by virtue of political protection, profitable relations with foreign capital or doing business with the State, which is responsible for their expropriation. If the weakening of public institutions is functional in the short term for the accumulation of a profitable and consuming class, in the long term it is responsible for the inefficiency of institutions (health, education, justice or even security), generally affecting the most disadvantaged, reproducing poverty and social protest.
Youth, unemployment, consumer society and frustrated social expectations have become the ingredients for a widespread youth revolt. The risk of an “Arab Spring” spreading to sub-Saharan African countries is a phenomenon that the Mozambican government has found difficult to deal with. Bringing about structural changes would imply a set of reforms that would affect the interests of a class-state and would therefore be complex to implement, which would only have immediate effects in the medium term, against a backdrop of youthful impatience. Unable to promote structural reforms, the government limits itself to managing relationships and tensions, coaxing or threatening disgruntled leaders, launching empty appeals to patriotism and unity, or manipulating reality, including during electoral elections.
Spaces of political engagement
Socio-demographic changes have had a profound impact on the country’s political reality. While in the 1994 and 1999 general elections Frelimo generally had more support among the urban electorate and Renamo among the rural electorate, in recent polls the opposition has achieved significant results in the country’s main municipalities and is clearly claiming electoral victory.
The increase of the school-going age and widespread access to smartphones and social networks has made urban youth more informed, with the expectation of more assertive and less accommodating political leaders. Younger voters have long ceased to relate to Frelimo because of the achievements of the liberation front in the past, but because of what the party is unable to provide in the present: infrastructure, public services and job opportunities.
In addition to economic difficulties, young people face obstacles in terms of socio-political participation. Financial difficulties and access to information for the majority, as well as bureaucracy, make it difficult to form associations capable of representing the interests of young students or workers in the informal sector. Although they make up the majority of the Mozambican population, this age group has little representation in decision-making bodies and little ability to influence public policies. Attempts to organize protests are usually prevented, sometimes repressed by the police, using tear gas and real bullets, in an invariably disproportionate response. Other than generating feelings of the state against the population, the lack of these spaces for exercising citizenship means that youth participation is pushed into informal spaces, where social networks, informal markets and the streets are the main channels for demands. By sharing memes and videos critical of the system of social relations, often using satire and mockery, young people are adopting a more accusatory attitude towards the status quo. In troubled political times, the official Facebook pages of the presidents of the Republic receive thousands of critical comments.
In this fragile democratic system, the main moment of political participation is the electoral ballot. However, these moments present two major obstacles. The first relates to the quality of the electoral debate, against a backdrop of a decline in the quality of education. Political economy issues are largely absent from secondary and university curricula, making it difficult for political parties to build manifestos based on ideological paradigms, but also for people to understand their programs. Election campaigns have become a political spectacle, without much information content. The more financially robust parties organize showcases, paying big fees to the most famous artists, distributing campaign clothing, transport logistics, food and drinks, and transporting people from distant areas. With less financial capacity, the opposition parties hold their marches through the city’s streets, to the sound of speakers with DJs and MCs, who entertain their supporters with provocative songs. When communicating with the population, they present shopping lists(demagogic promises of schools, hospitals, water and energy, roads or railways), without explaining the macroeconomic policies for this purpose.
The second problem has to do with the slippery slope on which elections take place. Free elections presuppose the existence of electoral rules and bodies that guarantee equal opportunities for contestants. The last few elections have shown a wide range of flaws, and a wide repertoire of manipulation of the rules of the game is evident:
- Voter registration processes invest more resources in areas where the Frelimo party is more popular and, on social media, videos of clandestine registration at night, transporting individuals from rural areas to register in urban areas, or even organized registration of foreign citizens (Zimbabweans) in border areas, invariably benefiting Frelimo, proliferate. Provinces are achieving census levels that exceed the demographic forecasts of the National Statistics Institute(INE).
- The period for presenting and validating political party candidacies is affected by intimidation and the exclusion of competing lists that are more uncomfortable for the ruling party (MDM’s candidacy in 2009, Samora Machel Júnior’s in 2018 for Ajudem, or Venâncio Mondlane’s in 2024 for CAD).
- During the election campaign period, the asymmetry of financial resources is disproportionate. The ruling party uses state resources to campaign, mobilizing means of transport, fuel and civil servants, even during working hours, interrupting classes and closing institutions. Identical realities are repeated in the few municipalities governed by the opposition.
- During the vote, there are countless videos and reports of citizens in possession of pre-voted ballot papers and attempts to stuff ballot boxes, invariably to the benefit of the ruling party.
- Finally, the vote-counting process is marked by countless episodes of opposition members being expelled, attempts at bribery, refusal to sign notices and polling station presidents fleeing the polling station. In many places, polling station staff are detained by the police and released after the count. During the vote count, media outlets and election observers reported live on the opposition’s significant victories in peri-urban areas, but the next day, notices were published showing the opposite results.
- The suspicions of fraud continue during the process of compiling the results by the electoral bodies, which is unjustifiably dragging on for two weeks. The electoral bodies refuse to publicly disclose the results, preventing an audit of the results and increasing the atmosphere of suspicion.
- Finally, appointed based on criteria of political trust, the decisions of the Constitutional Council are perceived as partisan.
In this scenario, the victories of opposition parties (such as in Beira or Quelimane) were only possible at the cost of great political efforts, involving the organization of popular vigilante movements at polling stations (aka “you voted, you sat down”), intense evidence-gathering and legal litigation, the organization of popular marches in the streets with the aim of political pressure, as well as blowing the whistle to embassies and international pressure.
Who won? David or Goliath?
The process of tainting election results has been so extensive that, in the last election, it became difficult to ascertain who really won the elections. While in large urban areas the evidence allows us to assume, with relative certainty, that the majority of the opposition has voted for the opposition, the reality is that, in rural areas, the real direction of the vote is beginning to be unknown. The evidence shows that, in the first general elections held in Mozambique, Renamo obtained its best results in rural areas in the central and northern parts of the country, with greater difficulties in large urban areas, where the population was more exposed to government propaganda. However, from the 2000s onwards, Frelimo extended its bases into the countryside, implementing a series of clientelist networks through the distribution of state resources (airtime, subsidies, pensions or salaries). This process resulted in the establishment of local chieftains, who set up a more oppressive machine, limiting the political work of the opposition and making it difficult to vote in elections. In districts in the central and northern of the country that had constituted an important labor reserve, where Renamo had an important support base, Frelimo went on to win the elections with percentages above 85%, increasing suspicion of ballot box stuffing and tampering with results. These “north korean” results have been explained from various factors:
- Firstly, the DDR took away Renamo’s ability to exert political pressure by threatening a return to guerrilla warfare, giving Frelimo greater leeway in setting up a fraud machine;
- Secondly, administrative decentralization and the possibility of electing figures at provincial level mobilized the entire clientelist network of the Party-State, motivated by obtaining positions and benefits. Members of the Frelimo party publicly repeated the objective of victory in all the country’s provinces, and it became the responsibility of each member to find the means to achieve this goal, encouraging an entrepreneurial approach to fraud.
- As a result of the above, the population becomes aware that voting is an ineffective mechanism, inviting abstention.
The political autism
The reality is that, with the aim of showing political work, those responsible for the electoral campaign are trying to convince the presidential candidates that the results obtained are true, despite the widespread increase in poverty and the weakening of the state. The gathering of expressive human frames in many showcases, artificially constituted with the help of large economic resources, influences those elected to convince themselves of broad popular support, reinforcing political autism. On the other hand, winning more seats in parliament brings financial benefits to the party, which is why the leadership is reluctant to admit situations of electoral injustice.While celebrating overwhelming electoral victories with pomp and circumstance, poorly paid police officers, with serious logistical problems, strive to disperse rioting youths scattered throughout many neighborhoods across the country. Faced with electoral contestation, they claim the need to resort to the institutions, secure in the knowledge that they are politically controlled.
The humbled shall be raised: emergence of messianic leaders
On such a slippery slope, elections are a real David versus Goliath battle, contributing to an exponential increase in the popularity of the most resilient opposition leaders. Social exclusion and political injustice facilitate the emergence of leaders with religiously inspired, messianic and millenarian discourses, with great potential for mobilizing youth. As Marx would explain, “religious misery is the result of real misery and, at the same time, the protest against real misery”. In the northern part of the country, there was an uprising of young people mobilized by an Islamic-inspired political discourse. In the south of Mozambique, a political leader has emerged with a Judeo-Christian discourse, capable of inspiring and offering hope to the country’s urban youth.
Venâncio Mondlane has been a particularly innovative leader. Firstly, because he inaugurated a form of politics based on recourse to legal and parliamentary channels, providing an alternative to the military Renamo. Paradoxically, he has been innovative once again by moving the guerrilla threat to the main urban areas of the country, with enormous media visibility and affecting the decision-making centers. The reality is that this army made up of lumpen youth is a much stronger movement than any charismatic leader, so the physical elimination of any political leader will only increase popular revolt and illegitimacy.
And now what?
Faced with what has been considered the most serious political crisis in Mozambique since the 16-year war, the question arises of how to get out of this standoff. The answer to this question will depend on a set of forces within the political actors in confrontation, namely within Frelimo, but also within the opposition.
On Frelimo’s side, the future will depend on the behavior of different party branches, which have been structured over the course of successive governments, not so much according to distinct political ideologies, but competition for access to state resources. In this process, the following have emerged:
- Members referred to as “moral reserves” or “ideological Frelimo”, generally older in the party, with more critical public attitudes towards opportunistic aggrandizement and government choices, even if they are economically dependent on relations with the state; On the other hand, a more pragmatic “moneyed Frelimo” has been consolidated, which tends to represent the party-state as a space for political protection or for doing business.
- A Frelimo that is more in favor of the democratic rule of law, the strengthening of institutions and the widening of spaces for participation, especially within the party, aware of the importance of a strong parliamentary opposition for democracy; and a more authoritarian and muscular Frelimo, which tends to see power not so much as a relationship (which needs to be negotiated), but above all as an object (which needs to be possessed), pushing opposition leaders towards radicalization.
In this scenario, before establishing any strategy for relations with the opposition and Mozambican society, the next President of Mozambique will have to define a strategy for managing the multiple economic interests and political attitudes within the Frelimo party.
On the opposition side, the scenarios can be distinguished between:
- Unity of the opposition around Venâncio Mondlane, forming a united and organized front, or fragmentation of the opposition, due to growing competition for access to scarcer positions and benefits.
- Opting for a more institutional approach, insisting on appealing to the courts and parliament, building formal communication channels for negotiation with Frelimo; or a more aggressive approach, based on exploiting fear and violence, commanding an angry urban youth underground, or even forming an alliance with Renamo’s military wing, mobilizing a broader front.
- Maintaining a disorganized movement, exploiting the emotion of hopeless youths, who give their chests to police bullets, exploiting sensationalism and social commotion; or the ability to set up a more organized movement, with a structured political manifesto, setting up study offices and reform proposals, maturing a political ideology, organizing party cells, with the ability to disseminate guidelines and political mobilization.
The possibility of building a more stable country will depend on the ability of the more moderate branches of the different parties to strengthen their capacity for internal influence, and to establish inter-party communication channels. The need for national reconciliation does not occur so much at the grassroots level of society, but among political party elites.
The responsibility for ensuring the safety of the population lies with the State, in this case, the party in power, with the obligation to read the politics of the moment, as well as the initiative to carry out reforms and conversations with the different social and political forces in Mozambique. And the sooner Frelimo members realize that they no longer have the support of a large part of the population, the better it will be for the country. (JF)