Mozambique: New Book Launched This Week

The book by Joseph Hanlon is in Portuguese only, and will be available at the OMR (Observatório do Meio Rural) annual conference tomorrow (7 October) where author Joseph Hanlon is keynote speaker (see below). The conference takes place at Montebelo Indy Village conference centre, Maputo, starting from 08.30.

The ebook is free and can be downloaded from https://bit.ly/MozambiqueColoniaNovamente
The printed book is already on sale in Maputo bookshops.

The book argues Mozambique is in crisis. There are no jobs for young people, who cannot see a future. Poverty and inequality increase. Cabo Delgado suffers a resource curse and civil war. The ruling party knows that it cannot win fair elections. How did this happen?

In this book, Joseph Hanlon documents the scandalous and unbelievable behaviour of the IMF and donors, which promoted the emergence of oligarchs who used political status to gain economic power, and who would serve foreign interests. Corruption was actually promoted, for example in bank privatisation. Some Mozambicans resisted. After Banco Austral was looted, an honest banker, Siba Siba Macuacua was named president, but he was thrown off the top of his 15-storey bank building. The assassins and looters are known, but no one was prosecuted.

Elites were tacitly given the right to manipulate contracts with the State, and the right to trade heroin and hardwood timber. The complicit silence of the IMF and donors in the face of the various scandals described in this book was seen as evidence that what was once called "corrupt" had become an integral part of the new “free market”. But in exchange the new oligarchs ensured that foreign companies and countries benefitted from the gas, coal, rubies and hydroelectricity. The oligarchs became the local administrators for a new form of colonialism.

Ordinary people were hit because the IMF imposed austerity, pushing most funcionarios below the poverty line, meaning teachers and nurses had to ask extra money so they could feed their children. This pushed "public" services into the "free market", leading to widespread corruption, even in education, police, courts and army.

This books shows how, 50 years after independence, Mozambique has been recolonised. Will there be a new independence movement?