Mozambique’s first and former defence minister (1975 to 1986). Alberto Chipande, has strongly accused the United States of America of “sabotaging” the exploitation of natural gas in the northern Cabo Delgado province, according to online publication Integrity.
Cabo Delgado has seen October 2017 been at the centre of an insurgency associated to the Islamic State – Central Africa Province (ISCAP).
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A reservist general, the 83-year-old Chipande is a member of the ruling Frelimo party Political Commission and the uncle to the country’s current President, Filipe Nyusi, meaning that apart from belonging to the president’s inner circle, he is the Patriarch of the Makonde ethnic group.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time that Chipande has voiced sensitive opinions about national life. However, it is strange that this time he expressed a very strong opinion about the USA. The question is: under what circumstances does he make such statements? Is it common from a member of the Political Commission to express strong opinions, especially about a particular country.
When it comes to Frelimo, by dint of not being a cabinet minister nor the party’s secretary-general, Chipande is not authorised to issue public opinions about Mozambique’s relations with other countries.
A retired diplomat told Mozambique Insights that Washington might ask for explanations from Maputo in relation to Chipande’s accusations.
Security experts think that Chipande might be looking to find a suspect to blame for the strange insurgency that has been raging in Cabo Delgado since 2017. And nothing could be more obvious than the usual suspect, that is, the US, in line with Frelimo’s famous “foreign source” to explain antagonistic phenomena.
The cover of the 1 September edition of the weekly Savana, on the death of the Mozambican leader of the insurgency Bonomado Machude Omar, titled “An Announcement and Lots of Unknowns”, feeds a narrative of an internal origin of the insurgency, especially because the deaths of the insurgency leadership occurred in a short space of time.
In the same vein, the editor of the online publication “Carta”, Marcelo Mosse, wrote an opinion article of 30 August in which he satirised the situation in Cabo Delgado by tying the supposed end of terrorism to the end of Nyusi’s terms of office: “and terrorism has ended, just like Filipe Nyusi’s reign.”
The latest events in Cabo Delgado have cast some suspicion about the nature of the extremist insurgency, with the latest “victories” staring to feel like “tampering with evidence.”
Meanwhile, there are those trying to justify Chipande’s statements as the onset of senility, but perhaps they are statements of a group gripped by senility, just waiting for the nephew, the president, to rubber stamp them or to see how he will explain them away.
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