Armando Guebuza, who won the presidency of Mozambique in December 2004 elections, is one of the African leaders attending the Corporate Council on Africa's Business Summit in Baltimore this week. Guebuza, a leading member of the Frelimo independence movement since its early days, says one of his primary aims is attracting investment to Mozambique, which has been pursuing an aggressive policy of economic development after years of war against Portuguese colonial rule, followed by an insurgency backed by the white government in South Africa. A peace agreement with the former rebels in 1992 has largely held, and Renamo, despite continuing disputes about its implementation, holds seats in the country's parliament.
Mozambique and the United States have signed a Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFA) designed to promote trade between the two countries. U.S. officials cited Mozambique as "a positive model because of its impressive track record on democracy, political stability, economic growth, openness to foreign direct investment and expanding exports." President Guebuza talked to AllAfrica on the first day of the Summit.
Mozambique is one of the countries that will benefit from the recent agreement among the industrialized nations, leading up to next month's G8 Summit in Scotland, to reduce the debt of the world's poorest countries. Will this help you?
A lot. A lot. We used to have to spend 57 million U.S. dollars on debt servicing every year. We don't yet know how much the agreement reduces our payments - it reduces our debt by 47 per cent - but it will help. That money we save is going to be used in the social area: for education, for getting water to the population and for health services.
What are your top development priorities?
We consider that, together with the need of building the infrastructure that we lack in rural areas, we need to attract investment. The business climate in Mozambique is one of the reasons we are here today. People working in rural areas need better markets. They need work in order to create rural credit. You cannot solve the problems in those areas without rural credit. But first we need to make the work force more productive.
Today most of the youngsters in rural areas are unable to make a difference in their communities because they don't have enough education and training. They are not able to work to transform the situation for a better one, to promote the situation in their favor.
Is tourism one of those areas that you see as a development engine, where you want to expand infrastructure?
Definitely. Today Mozambique is becoming a tourist attraction. But the problem is that we do not have enough infrastructure, and we are lacking transport to attract more people into those tourist areas. We have game parks, nice resorts, very good beaches along the coast - with some hotels but not enough, not enough. So we need infrastructure. We're not making use of all those things, so we want to attract investment in that area.
The Working Group on Climate Change and Development has just released a report in London warning that unless industrialised countries cut carbon emissions by a huge amount, development in poor countries may not only stop, but may be reversed, and that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, designed to halve poverty by 2015, may not be met. At the same time, the report cites Mozambique as an example of creative initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change - changes already being felt in Mozambique - at the community level. What prompts these responses?
We have a situation now where floods, where droughts are usual. This makes it easy for people to understand that something is happening, that where there is an international alarm sounding, that there is something we can do at home. People are understanding that they need to do things. That's why we are working hard.
Education in general and more opportunities for girls in particular are among the Millennium Development Goals. Do you see Mozambique as reaching some of the goals?
It is reaching for them, but we haven't reached yet. We still have a challenge to reach those goals, still have a long way to go to do that. We're moving towards that, but we have not achieved.
Mozambique has a woman as prime minister - an advance in gender equity over many industrial democracies. But that doesn't guarantee that women and girls will experience equity in their own lives, in their communities, doesn't insure that they can attain an education or negotiate safe sexual relations, for instance.
Starting with "up there" at the top - here we have the minister of foreign affairs (gesturing to Alcinda Antonio de Abreu), who is a woman, other ministers who are women. In parliament we have more than 30 per cent of deputies, members of parliament who are women. Two governors out of eleven are women. So women are part of the leadership in administration and in this fight against gender discrimination.
We are now feeling that we are on the way to reach some level of girls in primary school that almost matches the female population. We still have problems, they have problems, but today we have more girls than we used to have - more than double. Our challenge is to make sure that they go all the way to university, or at least through secondary school.
Another of the development goals is reducing the burden of HIV. How are you attacking the severe problem Mozambique has with HIV/Aids?
We have a national commission where all organizations, both non-governmental organizations and government, consider strategies against Aids and how to implement those decisions. The area where we are now going to concentrate mostly is in mobilizing rural communities to explain what must be done. We have been doing that, but not enough, not enough, because we have had an attitude of marketing urban-type messages. But to solve the problem of Aids, we need to go into our communities, take into consideration our rites, our customs, such as when a child grows up, those initiation rites. We think we can make a difference by making this fight against Aids part of our cultural practices.
You share a common border with Zimbabwe, where there is both rising opposition to the long rule of Robert Mugabe and a crackdown on government opponents, as well as the current clearance of informal settlements and traders from urban areas into camps. How does the turmoil there affect Mozambique? Do you see hope for Zimbabwe?
I do. I did visit Zimbabwe recently. But I don't think it's an easy situation. I saw that with the new election that took place there is an expectation from many people that other avenues will have to be found to establish more contact between interested parties. Of course the economic situation in Zimbabwe creates problems in Mozambique. Our ports [through which Zimbabwe imports and exports goods] are not functioning as they should. We have all those problems. But I don't see the situation as one of despair. There is hope. But we still have a long way, probably. How to act on that situation - one thing is by using all avenues open to us to try to sensitize our neighbors.
Frelimo, the party you represent, has been in power for three decades now. In such a situation, how can you deal with issues of transparency, of accountability, when one party remains in power for such a long time? At the same time, Renamo, the main opposition party, is saying it is boycotting the on-going 30th anniversary of independence. [Note: The Mozambique elections of December 2004, which international observers termed free and fair but Renamo disputed, gave Frelimo 63.7 per cent of the presidential vote and Renamo 31.7 per cent. The balloting also gave Frelimo 160 parliamentary seats to Renamo's 90. In contravention of the 1992 peace agreement, which aimed at integrating Renamo and Frelimo forces, Renamo still maintains an armed militia in parts of central Mozambique. The government says its wants to solve the problem peacefully, and officials recently suggested that sentiment inside Renamo for accommodation is strengthening, although longtime Renamo leader Aphonso Dhlakama continues to resist collaboration.]
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Regarding Renamo, they're saying that they're going to celebrate alone, but that will only happen among their leaders. Most of the people, including Renamo's militants, are celebrating, are participating in all these celebrations.
I think that if you want to have a change you must be conscious of what is wrong, what are your limitations and what were your limitations from a long time ago. As we are going through these 30 years, we have learned a lot, and on the basis of that we want to make a change in order to better and to improve the conditions of our people. I do believe that we have very good conditions to do that. I'm not saying that this is easy, this process. I'm saying that we have very good conditions to do that.
Is one of those processes for implementing change the peer review mechanism of the African Union? Mozambique has submitted itself as one of the first countries for peer review.
Yes, we have done that, first because we understand that we are not perfect; second because we need to have a system that can show us where our failures are and the reasons for those; thirdly, through this process we can know exactly how to define a strategy to overcome the problems that we have, in the institutional area, as well as in other areas.
United States and Mozambique Sign Trade and Investment Framework Agreement [press release].
Africa: Up in Smoke? [pdf]: Second Report from the Working Group on Climate Change and Development.
