How Mozambique’s corrupt elite caused tragedy in the north

The century turned differently for Mozambique; after a gruelling civil war in the 1990s, the award-winning president Joaquim Chissano and his team of young technocrats like Prime Minister Luisa Diogo worked to turn the country around. The IMF resident representative Felix Fischer told this author in 2009 that Mozambique’s post-conflict bounce back was ‘Vietnam-like’ in its trajectory.

New mining and energy projects, a smelter that had brought back international capital, a useful balance of Chinese infrastructure and European budget support. Tourists flooded over the border from South Africa. Jobs were being created.

With the arrival of President Armando Guebuza – an authoritarian Frelimo general – in 2004, the technocrat faction of the party shrank, and those linked to the military grew.

‘Mr Gue-Business’ as he was nicknamed, heralded an uptick in elite self-enrichment… and also the beginning of a more confrontational attitude towards the north.

THE H TRAIN

Drugs trafficking was already a huge problem in Mozambique – a country which, according to César Guedes of the UN office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), can barely manage it’s own security, “let alone prevent international crime syndicates operate across its 3,600km of coastline”.

For example, “Despite anti-corruption rhetoric, the ruling FRELIMO party has not shown much serious political will to combat narcotrafficking”, said a leaked US diplomatic cable in 2010:

“Mohamed Bashir Suleman (‘the other MBS’), described as the largest narcotrafficker in Mozambique, has direct ties to President Guebuza and former President Chissano. Other traffickers bribe both high and low level officials. Chief of Customs Domingos Tivane is a significant recipient of these narcotrafficking-related bribes. Police officials told Embassy officers that they are unwilling to go after “big fish” narcotraffickers because of their ties to senior officials.”

Guebuza’s protegé Celso Correira (now minister for land and rural development, and campaign manager for current president Nyusi) took over management of the Nacala Port, identified as a key channel for much of the illicit cargo that come in and out of Mozamique. Then the biggest narcotrafficker, MBS was the number one financier of the ruling party, according to US diplomats.

The amounts are eye-watering. In 2018, London-based academic and former international correspondent in Mozambique, Joseph Hanlon estimated some $600-800m of Heroin transited through Mozambique annually, with $100m used to bribe members of FRELIMO, in a paper called ‘The Uberization of Mozambique’s heroin trade’.

“Mozambique is part of a complex chain which forms the east African heroin network. Heroin goes from Afghanistan to the Makran coast of Pakistan, and is taken by dhow to northern Mozambique. There, the Mozambican traffickers take it off the dhows and move it more than 3000 km by road to Johannesburg, and from there others ship it to Europe”, writes Hanlon.

“Heroin arrives on dhows 20-100 km off the coast. The Mozambican role is to take it from the dhows, move it by small boat to the coast and then by road to warehouses, and finally take it by road 3000 km to Johannesburg, South Africa. The 10-40 t/y estimate is from dhows only, and further significant amounts of heroin also arrive in containers of other imports, particularly at the northern port of Nacala.”

BOATLOADS OF CASH

It is not just drugs. In the dog days of the Guebuza administration, when he was trying to change the constitution to allow a third term, the connected elite pulled off an even greater heist.

This time it was robbing the Treasury in Maputo. In 2014, a secret $850m loan for Ematum, a tuna-fishing company owned – curiously – by Mozambique’s intelligence services. Other secret loans have come to light, including the $525m MAM loan.

Stephen Bailey-Smith, a senior economist at Global Evolution, which eventually bought the loans when they were repackaged, says the debt repackaging finally demystified the tuna bonds: “Investors assumed this was effectively sovereign debt. I don’t think anyone in their right mind thought they were taking a risk solely linked to a tuna-fishing company. Remember, at the time, people were jumping up and down about how Mozambique would be the next big thing, one of the largest gas producers in world, and people wanted to get in early. With limited other opportunities, the bonds provided a way in.”

Not everyone was doing well. While on a tour of the country, Brazil’s President Lula remarked, “No Mozambican can feel proud to open their car door and see a hungry person looking for something to eat in the rubbish.”

WELCOME TO CABO DELGADO

While foreign investors were piling into Mozambique’s energy sector, and local elites were grabbing what they could from narcotics, a small insurgency was gathering pace in the historically neglected north.

In 2012, the radical Kenyan Islamic cleric Aboud Rogo Mohammed was assassinated. Aboud Rogo funnelled cash and recruits to Al-Shabaab in Somalia and was linked to Al Qaeda in East Africa. He had cult leader status for his youthful supporters from the Ansar Muslim Youth Council, who were slowly pushed south.

Radical imams in Tanzania welcomed them. But the ‘Kibiti Killing’s of police officers in southern Tanzania triggered a crackdown from President Magufuli’s government in 2017, with bodies reported washing up on the beach in Dar es Salaam. “Some of the survivors, already radicalised, are believed to have moved into Mozambique”, says Dino Mahtani, International Crisis Group Deputy Director for Africa.

They were joined by artisanal miners kicked out of the Monte Puez ruby mine in Northern Mozambique. “Locals say the region has been turned into a ‘militarized zone’ where state forces and a South African-owned security company have allegedly beaten villagers and killed illegal miners”, reports Estacio Valoi and Gesbeen Mohammad.

Gemfields, which owns the mine and makes Fabergé Eggs, said in a statement: “Local and religious leaders inform us with great concern for how artisanal miners and traders have changed the social fabric of their communities, through marrying under-age girls, and bringing alcohol and drugs into the community.”

INSURGENT ERUPTION

In early 2017, an insurgency known locally as Al-Shabaab, inspired by but unrelated to the Somali insurgents, briefly seized the smuggling port town of Mocambique de Praia, in Mozambique’s poorest province Cabo Delgado. It was the first time they would do so, but not the last.

This slow Islamic-inflected insurgent migration south co-incided with a tightening of maritime security efforts in Kenya and Tanzania, says the UNODC’s Guedes, which itself squeezed the drag traffickers south down the Swahili coast. “Mozambique, even through it was further south, still made sense to the syndicates”.

As with all successful trading, it is useful to have goods travelling in both directions; the grim trade of heroin met with Asian demand for Mozambican illicit produce.

Then the drugs syndicates were joined by gem and timber smugglers, wildlife traffickers, and human traffickers – including human body parts. “Some of the decapitated bodies in the streets seen after the Palma attack had also had their fronts opened up”, says Mozambican researcher Tomás Queface from the University of Sussex.

To what extent to insurgents and syndicates overlap? Guedes points to a boat seized off the Mozambique coast coming from Asia with both drugs to be smuggled and arms for the militants.

“Now that Al-Shabaab controls large segments of the Cabo Delgado coast line, there are fears that they are already beginning to take a slice of illicit coastal smuggling, including taxing drugs cargos that transit through waters and land they control”, says Mahtani, who thinks the links are more opportunistic. “They wont be involved in making the international trade of narcotics happen, but if drugs are still flowing into Cabo Delgado, then it stands to reason they might take a cut of the trade, either by transit fees or taxes, or from facilitating transport and landing of cargoes.”

For certain, criminals have the run of the province, and pay off the authorities, or attack them if they get in the way. Collusion goes to the highest levels of military intelligence, suspect some analysts. One diplomatic source tells The Africa Report, “The military are all neck-deep in drugs, and they don’t want people to see that”.

Mozambican researcher Queface says there are fears that the insurgents have penetrated the military: “The militants always seem to know where they army is going to attack.” President Nyusi appointed a more capable general to the region in January but he contracted Covid-19 soon after and died.

Some analysts believe the government doesn’t want international forces in Cabo Delgado because “then all eyes will fall on the scale of illicit trafficking that goes on in the province, and a lot of other things could come to light”, says Louw-Vaudran.

There were also question marks over the length of time – several months – that the insurgency were able to take and hold Mocambique de Praia. “We don’t know what they are hiding”, says Queface. Even former president Guebuza has told journalists that the government was not sending the best soldiers and commanders to the north. Journalists, academics and aid workers are mostly barred from the area. A UK journalist, Tom Bowker, was deported for reporting on the insurgency

Some people are being driven off the land, “and then when the land has been evacuated, people approach concession holders saying ‘do you want to sell’, with interested buyers coming to the table to flip properties into their own hands, and put the squeeze on those who don’t have the protection”, says the diplomatic source.

THINGS CAN GET WORSE

As all eyes are on the heroin traffic to the north, in the south, concerns are growing that Brazil’s fearsome cocaine cartels are getting a foot in the door.

The PCC is Brazil’s most-powerful and internationally-connected syndicate. The arrest of PCC operative Gilberto Aparecido Dos Santos, alias “Fuminho,” in Maputo in April 2020 raises flags for the UNODC’s Guedes. Brazilian media report him as having already made several smuggling deals across multiple African countries.

Despite the arrest, cocaine busts continue. In January 2021, five men were arrested by police on cocaine smuggling charges. “The group was caught while “threatening” the alleged receiver of the drugs, a Nigerian who allegedly received eight kilograms of cocaine from Brazil, worth an estimated 18 million meticais, and destined for South Africa”, reports Omardine Omar.

“It is not what Mozambique needs right now”, says Guedes, who suspects it was an attempt to look for new cocaine routes into Asia. “When you look at other countries who have both heroin and cocaine smuggled through them [such as Guinea Bissau] … it is total destabilisation of the state”.

That matters for the region, which is perhaps why Ramaphosa finally managed to get a Southern African Development Community meeting in Maputo on 8 April, and commitment to send a ‘technical mission’ to Cabo Delgado.

A former top official in Zimbabwe told us the Maputo meeting was torn between President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s pushing for his country to lead a intervention force to Mozambique and Ramaphosa’s plan which has won the day, for now. Nyusi was between the two options but still preferring to use forces from outside the region, such as Portuguese and United States’ trainers.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Depending how you add it all up, the gas export project, with a price tag ranging from $20bn to $120bn, is Africa’s biggest industrial project today.

It is a huge investment for the energy companies and banks involved. They’re unlikely to it shut down – even if the window for fossil fuels is closing as rich countries invest in the green energy transition.

There is also a rush to sow up the remaining large LNG contracts – the China-Iran deal, for example, shrinks global gas appetite.

And as Liesl Louw-Vaudran of the Institute for Security Studies points out, “South Africa is on the hook”. The state investment company IDC is invested in Mozambique Gas, South Africa’s largest bank Standard Bank has sunk $485m into the project.

The planned industrial hub will likely not happen. “I saw powerpoint presentations from Standard Bank saying 5,000 expats would be permanently based in Palma, they would need all the services, creating opportunities for SMEs to go – and they did go, and these were the guys that were targeted”, says Louw-Vaudran.

The Palma attack is turning point for the insurgency; not just in their methods of attack, but in their victory, says security analyst Jasmine Opperman. Between 40 – 80 vehicles were stolen during the raid, bank vaults busted, telecoms equipment taken. They have money, wheels and communications. And perhaps now greater ambition. Queface expects larger towns like Nangade to be hit.

“There are 19 cells, and at minimum 2,500 fighters”, says Opperman, who says their ranks have swollen massively in the last year.

INTERVENTION SHOULD FOCUS ON DRUGS

Beyond the region, the international community needs to get involved. For Mahtani, this should start with “the stamping out of the drug trade in the Indian Ocean”, which would de-escalate the corrupting flow of narcotic cash into the political economies of East and Southern Africa.

Guedes thinks that Europe needs to wake up to its role here: “Not many people realise that Shengen starts just a few hundred kilometers from Palma; Mayotte is France”. Given the French islands that dominate the Mozambique channel, and Operation Atalanta, the EU’s naval force that protects Somalia, Europe is well placed to extend naval forces in the area. Similarly, the US Joint Task Force in Bahrain cold play an interdicting role.

Beyond that, there are fears that other kinds of international interventions could lead to calamity. There is French military base in Mayotte. “The worst case would be if the French sent in the Légion Étrangère”, says Louw-Vaudran.

For Mahtani, there is a security stalemate in the north which requires intervention, but not at the risk of squashing Mozambique sovereign statehood.

Does Nyussi have a plan to keep Palma safe? Can he retake Mocambique de Praia – that would be a start, but does the Mozambican government have the resources to do it on its own? That is where Mozambique could perhaps give some ground, suggests Mahtani.

“Don’t rush into a heavy scorched earth counter-insurgency across the province. Start by recapturing the ports, and have a politically-driven plan to peel off some of the local insurgents urging them to surrender, giving promises of development to appeal to sons of the soil who have joined the insurgency”, says Mahtani, who sees military solution track like that pursued in Afghanistan as something to avoid.

Although conditions have been deteriorating fast, over the past six months, according to regional analysts, most say that a decisive response now could stop that trend.

“It’s not too late to act”, says Guedes.