19 November 2007
Maputo — Businessman Nyimpine Chissano, the oldest son of Mozambique's former President Joaquim Chissano, died at his Maputo home on Monday morning.
Family sources quoted by Radio Mozambique confirmed his death.
37 year old Chissano was known to have been in poor health for a considerable period, and had received a kidney transplant.
Both Joaquim Chissano, and his wife Marcelina are in Europe. The former President had been participating in a conference in Madrid, and then travelled on to meet his wife in the Portuguese city of Oporto, where she had been undergoing medical treatment.
The couple plan to return to Maputo as soon as possible.
Nyimpine was born in Tanzania in 1970, at the height of Mozambique's war for independence from Portuguese colonial rule - which was why Joaquim and Marcelina gave their son the name Nyimpine, meaning "during the war" in the Shangaan language.
Chissano Jr went into business in the mid-1990s, concentrating on tourism and car hire activities. His best known venture was the company Expresso Tours.
But it was not his business activities that put him under the media spotlight. In 2002, he was accused of involvement in the murder of the country's top investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, who was gunned down on the streets of Maputo on 22 November 2000.
Six men were found guilty of the murder in a trial that lasted from November 2002 to January 2003. During that trial, one of the businessmen who ordered the killing, the notorious loan shark Momad Assife Abdul Satar ("Nini"), admitted that he had paid large sums of money to the head of the death squad, Anibal dos Santos Junior ("Anibalzinho"), but claimed to have done so at the behest of Nyimpine Chissano.
The money, Satar claimed, was thus a loan to Nyimpine Chissano, and he had no idea it was payment for a contract killing. Satar produced seven post-dated cheques, from Chissano's company "Expresso Tours", and signed by Chissano himself, which were supposedly repayment for this loan.
When he took the stand, Chissano admitted his annoyance about articles Cardoso had written about the Chissano family, but vehemently denied any connection with the murder. He claimed the cheques were payment for a loan, not from Satar, but from a business acquaintance named Candida Cossa, and he had no idea how they had fallen into Satar's hands. (Cossa, however, later denied ever setting eyes on the cheques before.)
Prosecutors launched an investigation, and opened a second case file on the murder, with Nyimpine Chissano as a suspect. Nothing much happened for over three years, and then, in April 2006, Chissano was formally charged. Prosecutors delivered a charge sheet to the Maputo City Court accusing him of "joint moral authorship" of the murder - that is, that he was among those who ordered the assassination.
From then up until now, there were no further developments, although whenever asked about it, the then Attorney-General, Joaquim Madeira, would insist that investigations were continuing. Now there can be no further trial: the death of Nyimpine Chissano ends the investigation.
This is a case where justice delayed has become justice denied.
Chissano will now never have a chance to clear his name. And those who suspect his involvement in the killing will never know whether there really was a case against him.
The prosecutors have been tight-lipped, and never revealed whether they had unearthed any hard evidence. The seven cheques brandished by Nini Satar are not hard evidence. For while they certainly indicate a business relationship between Expresso Tours and Satar, they do not constitute proof of assassination.
In a court case, Chissano's obvious defence would have been that Satar, his brother Ayob, and their associate Vicente Ramaya dragged his name into the affair in order to obscure their own guilt. After all, Ramaya and the Satars did have a clear motive for wanting Cardoso dead - he had been campaigning vigorously to have them brought to trial for their role in the country's largest bank fraud in which the equivalent of 14 million dollars was syphoned out of the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM).
No-one has ever been able to suggest a similarly strong motive for Nyimpine Chissano.
While Nyimpine's case will now never reach a courtroom, the matter of his cheques has already been considered by the Supreme Court. For in February, the Supreme Court threw out the appeals from Nini Satar and the other assassins, and in doing so demolished Satar's defence based on the cheques.
The Court found Satar's story of handing over large sums of money to Anibalzinho at Chissano's request, without even asking what the payment was for, incredible. Satar had been unable to explain why he had not demanded from Chissano any declaration, invoice or receipt - some document confirming that the money had been delivered. Surely this was a basic procedure that a businessman such as Satar would not have neglected.
The real reason Satar was not worried about receipts, the Court said, was that the money he delivered at Anibalzinho was "dirty".
It was not a loan at all, and there was never any intention that it should be repaid.
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