Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi has urged the incoming Minister of the Interior, Pascoal Ronda, to fine-tune the country’s policing strategies to combat terrorism, organised crime, including kidnappings and abductions, money laundering, cyber and environmental crimes.
Nyusi was speaking on Wednesday during Ronda’s swearing-in ceremony. A former police general commander in the 90s, Ronda replaces Arsénia Massingue, who was sacked after just 21 months on the job.
Comment
Nyusi call is quite strange. The insurgency in the northern Province of Cabo Delgado is already on its sixth year but two crucial things never happened:
First, he never declared a state of war in Cabo Delgado, which would make for a better approach to tackling the insurgency and violent extremism in the province.
He procrastinated as much as he could, issuing a certificate of incompetence to the State Information and Security Service (SISE) and the Ministry of Defence while he managed the insurgency with the police.
Second, Mozambique never presented a clear, precise and concise strategy on how the country would fight the insurgency.
Even then, he still requested and received support from different countries and regions, but the absence of a strategy put paid any effort to take an effective approach against the insurgency.
As a result, the insurgency grew day by day until it had an ascendancy over Mozambique’s Defence and Security Forces (FDS), it caused the death of thousands and displaced over a million people.
Also, those who dealt directly with the war on the insurgency profited – for example, military and police top brass paid a supermarket in Maputo supposedly to provide supplies to the fighting forces in Cabo Delgado. But, for its part, the supermarket deposited unspecified amounts of money in the bank accounts of the bigwigs as kickbacks for awarding it the contract.
Surely, the cost of Nyusi’s procrastination cannot disappear with the reading of a few paragraphs of a speech.
The procrastination and the lack of a meaningful strategy on Cabo Delgado might have been the issue between Pretoria and Maputo, leading the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to delay sending boots to Mozambique as it did not know the rules of engagement.
And when the SADC Mission in Mozambique (SAMIM) did arrive in Cabo Delgado, it rarely deployed into combat areas, whilst Rwanda engaged with the insurgents and got a €20 million war chest from the European Union and unspecified amounts from France and its oil giant TotalEnergies.
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