On Tuesday, Mozambique joined the International Coffee Organisation becoming its 43rd producer member, according to Mozambican media.
The group’s members produce 93 percent of the world’s coffee.
Present at the ceremony was the country’s Agricultural and Rural Development Minister Celso Correia, whose ministry claims that the young Mozambican coffee industry produces 870 tonnes per year.
Correia then travelled to the headquarters of Chatham House, a policy institute also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs. So far, no official statement has been released.
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Contrary to the event on coffee organisation in which the PR machine made sure Mozambicans knew that the country had just joined the coffee club, there has been no word of what might have transpired at the Chatham House.
Sources told Mozambique Insights that both of Correia’s cameo appearance at the coffee club and the Chatham House were orchestrated to provide the minister an international platform from which he could send messages back home – it is no secret that Correia harbours ambitions of succeeding President Filipe Nyusi, when the latter steps down in January 2025.
Lately, Correia has been using international fora to buttress his ambitions by making statements directed at a certain public back in Mozambique. Speaking in April, at the World Bank Spring Meetings, in Washington, Correia said that “Africa should not import models, nor become a laboratory for experiences,” adding that it should not get down on its knees, ”waiting for solutions that come from outside, regarding the continent’s food sovereignty and climate change.”
To boot, he harangued the participants of the “need to respect the culture and development stage in which the producers are in, and not import solutions from other realities and impose them, because that will not work.”
So, this could be the reason Correia visited Chatham House to project the image that he is ready to wear the presidential mantle.
If on the one hand time is ticking for Nyusi, on the other it will also tell what was discussed behind Chatham House’s closed doors, especially what Correia might have secretly intimated. Regardless, it is interesting that no statement was released.
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