Instead of dying out, as Frelimo hoped, the protests are becoming more pointed. Some in Frelimo are now comparing the national protests to the war in Cabo Delgado.
Knocking down the statue of Alberto Chipande today (Friday) in Pemba and dragging it thought the streets is particularly symbolic. (See photo below and video on https://bit.ly/Moz-El-Chip.)
Chipande fired the first shots of the independence war. At age 85 he is still on the Frelimo Political Commission, and had become the most powerful person in Cabo Delgado. For the protesters, he is the symbol of all that is wrong.
And protesters are no longer just blocking streets but are attacking Frelimo headquarters and government offices. Supreme Court Chief Justice Adelino Muchanga said that the Wednesday (4 December) protest in Morrumbala, Zambézia, was the same as the first insurgent attack in Mocimboa da Praia, Cabo Delgado, in 2017. In both cases the local court was burned.
Muchanga may not have noticed, but the protesters have seen that hundreds of peaceful demonstrators have been arrested and charged, but there have been no charges against the police who have killed nearly 100 demonstrators. Courts have become symbols of oppression, and not of justice.
For seven years Frelimo has refused to see that the Cabo Delgado insurgency is about poverty and the taking of resources by the Frelimo elite, and instead keeps saying that it is foreign destabilisation that can be solved by foreign mercenaries. Now Frelimo says the protests are foreign destabilisation.
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But young people saw Frelimo’s ability to perpetrate a massive electoral fraud, as reported here daily over more than a year. And the youth saw Frelimo taking political control of elecitions in the same way it has taken control of the economy, ministries and even courts. Thus protests have expanded from being about electoral fraud to being about Freliimo control in general.
Demonstrations in Maputo, Matola and Gaza show clearly that Frelimo has lost many of its traditional supporters, including the middle classes such as doctors, teachers and lawyers.
Supreme Court head Adelino Muchanga is correct - the Cabo Delgado war has spread to the rest of the country. As in Cabo Delgado, it is still possible to negotiate a settlement. But the young people in the streets of Pemba, Morrumbala and Chibuto see they have growing support. Time for Frelimo to enter serious discussions is growing short.
