Tangled up in the web they themselves wove, the Makonde ethnic group, which has closed ranks and built walls around Mozambique and the ruling Frelimo party’s President Filipe Nyusi, is in an existential dilemma: they will go down in history as the ones who handed power over to the opposition or maintain a shameful electoral victory that could plunge the country and Frelimo into a dangerous political crisis that could spell disaster in 2024.
In any case, the group loses. It remains to be seen whether it will drag Frelimo and the country down with it.
The “Makondenisation” of the national security cluster (with the war in Cabo Delgado, the slush fund has become bottomless) and of some state sectors have been the most salient features of a deviation from Frelimo’s governing strategy: good or bad.
Another aspect to group’s insidiousness has been the progressive weakening of the party by reducing the strategic and ideological glue to nightly meetings held at the home of its Patriarch, Alberto Chipande, to discuss everything related to businesss and opportunities for the group in all areas of the national economy.
The hidden debts
From the start, the hidden debts, whose management was possible between walls, were not a mystery for Nyusi. The strategy had been to use the hidden debts to drastically affect former President Armando Guebuza’s role and importance in the party and keep him tamed.
The term “hidden debts” refers to loans worth $2.2 billion obtained from the banks Credit Suisse and VTB Russia by three Mozambican companies, ProIndicus, EMATUM (Mozambique Tuna Company) and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management), with the sole contractor and supplier, the Abu Dhabi-based group Privinvest, selling them fishing boats, radar stations and other assets at exceedingly inflated prices, between 2013 and 2014.
With the backing of his new friends (current Agricultural Minister Celso Correia and company), Nyusi brought the issue to the public sphere and started a cycle that he was not able to control, ending up in a staged trial that only touched upon the commissions charged by some of the defendants and left out the real problem and the real players.
Even so, the mention of his name, as the New Man, is evidence of his role in this business that sank because of the ambition of the agents involved, with the approval or otherwise of the incumbent. In this situation, Celso Correia (always him) manoeuvres to change the narrative about the country: SUSTENTA, the agro-business project backed by the World bank, grabs the headlines and is beamed in the main television programmes while the trial continues.
In an interview with the Portuguese public television, RTP, in Lisbon, he got visibly nervous because he could see he was failing to communicate his message, with a similar result at a Chatham House event, in London. After these two embarrassing moments, he started using the complicated and sometimes childish exercise of communicating with examples and parables that only he understands.
Correia saves him from another tantrum in London and acts as his main counsellor or Foreign Affairs Minister and translates Nyusi in the main world capitals.
Abroad, those effected by the hidden debts start preparing themselves. At the end of the local legal circus, London beckoned to Nyusi, New York squeezed Pretoria to hand over former Finance Minister Manuel Chang for his role in the hidden debts, and the saga continues.
Celso Correia
Correia plays a crucial role in this crisis either because he could be the cause by feeding Nyusi’s ego with pipe dreams that barely succeeded but which have inflated the president’s ego and that of the group in an inglorious fight with Guebuza, or by organising the group’s accumulation scheme mainly for Nyusi and manipulating the succession process. After all, he is reported to have said that “after this one, anyone can be a president.”
His entry into the Political Commission, the body that guides Frelimo in the intervals between the Central Committee sessions, gave him access to a greater control of the internal political mechanisms and a broader latitude of action with the objective of ensuring resources, allies and establish conditions for the maintenance of Nyusi’s hegemony, and testing the waters for the manipulation of the succession process, seeing that in the body he would be able to control the presidential candidates and have access to information on the subject from all quarters
His appointment as Head of Central Brigade for Nampula and Frelimo’s National Campaign Director gave him the plaudits he needs to play any game with the electoral results that would be attributed to his organisational capacities as Frelimo’s Electoral Chief, which gave Nyusi comfortable victories (outside, as always, the party’s traditional control): 57% in 2014 to succeed Guebuza and 73% for re-election in 2019 (Guebuza obtained 63.7% to succeed former President Joaquim Chissano in 2004 and 75,46% in his reelection in 2009, remaining Frelimo’s most voted presidential candidate to date).
Correia managed to insinuate himself as Nyusi’s political shadow and strategist throughout his two terms of office and has moved up the ranks in the second term when he seemed to be the only one who gave Nyusi visibility in the middle of the hidden debt crisis, and in the face of the muteness of his peers in the Council of Ministers, who have avoided outshining the leader. Celso flatters in private and agrees with Nyusi in public, repeating and reinforcing ideas previously shared with the latter (?), selling the idea the Nyusi is a brilliant leader who is up to the job.
Despite the uneasiness and suspicions of the hawkish General Salvador M’tumuke, Correia continued his crusade as Nyusi’s shadow and alma pater. As results, he is still in government and has a seat at the Political Commission table, while M’tumuke only has access to the group by virtue of his being of the Makonde ethnic group, but is out of the official banquet, that is, the government.
Nampula
Will Frelimo’s wounded pride be satisfied should Nampula be returned to its control (despite the apparent lack of strategy and disunity in the local ranks)? Or is it a challenge that Correia had set for himself to debit on his political ledger as a campaign maverick with the prospect of either a clean victory or a plan B involving rigging the election surreptitiously?
Giving Nampula on a silver platter to Nyusi would be tantamount to saying that the country is the sky and as such, the limit. Correia embarked on an endeavour that has almost been won. He settled in Nampula, mandated by the Makonde group and validated by the Political Commission for the difficult task of saving Frelimo from itself and giving his friend/leader a smooth exit and enough encouragement to sit down and discuss the succession.
“The Makwas are fake” must have echoed in his ears as he gradually received the first signs of defeat. The only way out was the surreptitious fraud that was implemented haphazardly creating the current impasse: surrender or stubbornness? Surrendering would represent capitulation and stubbornness his political end, not least because he is the infiltrator about whom almost everybody only mentions in sotto voce and nothing else.
Amid the crisis, the wax that this Mozambican Icarus used to glue his wings together, which propelled him too close to the sun could melt. And Frelimo does not forgive its enemies and for historians, (Party Elders) Correia is THE enemy, THE infiltrator, the current Leon Milas – joining Frelimo by the hand of Eduardo Mondlane, Milas was a United States citizen who is suspected to have been a Central Intelligence of America (CIA) agent spying the liberation movement he ranked up to Chief of Defenses department.
What’s the Group worth?
The group has shown itself to be a dangerous self-enclosed group that has patiently waited 39 years (11 under the late President Samora Machel, 18 under Chissano and 10 under Guebuza) to hold the reins of power of the country and do with it what Lázaro N’Kavandame always wanted: use and abuse it – N’Kavandame was a Makonde nationalist who defended the liberation of the northern Cabo Delgado province. He was expelled from the movement allegedly for syphoning off resources belonging to the cooperatives in the so-called “liberated zones.”
The crisis is in full swing. Neither Nyusi, the symbol of the group, nor Chipande, the patron, speak out against the South. Correia, the mentor and tool of Nyusismo, and Roque Silva, the party’s Secretary-General, have stayed away from the press in the face of a crisis, and they have instead sent Ludmila Maguni, the young spokesperson of the Central Committee, to address the media. This has been considered an act of cowardice from people fearing facing the consequence of a useless and costly authoritarianism, the informal approach of this government, and the eminent bankruptcy of the state.
Meanwhile, Bernardino Rafael, the police General-Commander, like a hellhound, continues his repressive incursions against everything and everyone, without realising the consequence of his actions as always. He persecutes the opposition, intimidates comrades and represses the youth just for breathing. It is said that he is still dreaming of being the president of the republic, evinced by how he tries to imitate Marshal Samora Machel while adorned with medals of dubious value on his chest.
For Nyusi, the banquet may come to an abrupt end. Behind the scenes and by word of mouth, his friends are already washing their hands of the banquet and blame him and his children for the past nine years. “It was the boss’s orders. It was his children who did it.” At the end of his term, King Nyusi may discover that he has been the court jester all along.
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