Maputo — Traffic was flowing normally again along Maputo's main roads on Thursday morning, after eight days of disruption caused by followers of Mozambique's fugitive presidential candidate, Venancio Mondlane.
Mondlane had called for no vehicles to move on the roads between 08.00 and 15.30, and groups of young men enforced his instructions, often by placing barricades or piles of burning tyres on the roads. Anyone with business at a government department in central Maputo had to arrive there before 08.00, when the shutdown began.
Most buses and minibuses stayed off the roads during the shutdown, forcing citizens to walk long distances between their homes and their workplaces (or simply to stay away from work).
But on Thursday, there were no more barricades, no burning tyres, and the minibuses that provide much of the city's passenger transport were full again.
However, there were still attempts to extort money from motorists at informal toll-gates, notably at the road past the city's main rubbish dump in the Hulene neighbourhood. When the independent television station "TV Successo' tried to investigate, the reporters were pelted with stones.
The fact that the Maputo roads were free of protestors is doubtless due to the lack of any further instructions from Mondlane. He usually broadcasts to his supporters every night over his Facebook page, but on Wednesday night there was no broadcast from Mondlane - just repetitions of the previous night's claim that he will be sworn in as President of the Republic on 15 January.
Mondlane's whereabouts are unknown, but he is believed to be hiding somewhere in Europe. The power of the movement he heads could be substantially diluted, if he is no longer able to communicate with his followers.
The worst violence on Wednesday took place in the central province of Zambezia, where rioters burnt down two of the local headquarters of the ruling Frelimo Party, in Mocuba and Ile districts.
In the Ile district capital, Errego, the rioters also broke into a prison and released all the inmates.
Further north, in Nampula province, rioters attacked and set on fire a goods train travelling from the port of Nacala to landlocked Malawi. The line to Nacala is currently blocked.
