Mozambique’s parliament and its new president, Daniel Chapo, were sworn in in mid-January 2025 after a tumultuous post-election period of protests, barricades and police violence.
The 9 October 2024 elections prompted countless reports of fraud, leading the European Union election observer mission to note
irregularities during counting of votes and unjustified alteration of election results.
Based on this, and other accounts of fraud, the opposition candidate Venâncio Mondlane claimed to have won the elections and coordinated several weeks of protests across the country.
These were met with a harsh police response. Over 4,200 people were reportedly arrested, 730 shot and 300 killed with live ammunition between 21 October 2024 and 16 January 2025.
After spending several weeks abroad, Mondlane returned to Mozambique on 9 January to join ongoing political talks between the government and opposition parties.
Read more: Mozambique's deadly protests: how the country got here
How can Mozambique move forward?
To get out of its political crisis will not be easy. It will require the party in power, Frelimo, to fundamentally change how it deals with disagreement and discontent. Buying off political opposition elites, as has been done in the past, will not calm this political storm.
Based on my research into political violence, I suggest that the cycles of violence in the country can only be broken if the new president addresses three issues related to state repression. He needs to do this in dialogue with opposition forces to earn trust and public support for the new government.
The three issues are:
putting an end to violence perpetrated by the police and army
ending political assassinations and ensuring accountability for the ones that have taken place
protecting media freedom and ending violence against journalists.
No more blind eye to police (and army) violence
Human rights experts urged the government in November 2024 to end the post-election violence and allow thorough investigations. Experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council expressed concerns about
violations of the right to life, including of a child, deliberate killings of unarmed protesters and the excessive use of force by the police deployed to disperse peaceful protests.
Such extensive repression has been a common response by the Mozambican security forces over the past years, with severe consequences for the evolution of conflict. For example, state repression has been a major contributor to armed conflict in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, where an Islamist insurgency has been raging since 2017. Victims of violence by security forces are an important source of recruits for the insurgency.
Accountability for political assassinations
Mozambique has suffered from targeted killings of political opposition figures. The most recent, high-profile political assassinations took place after the elections in October. Elvino Dias, Mondlane’s lawyer, and Paulo Guambe, an official of Podemos, the political party that supported Mondlane’s run for president, were shot dead in Maputo by unknown gunmen.
Dias was preparing a court case challenging the election results.
Mozambique has a long history of such political assassinations. These have rarely been investigated and no one has been held accountable. The government and police regularly deny any involvement, and people have come to speak of “death squads” seeking to intimidate the political opposition and civil society.
Freedom of the press and civil society
The ability of the press in Mozambique to hold people accountable for their actions has been severely constrained. Its ability to report and investigate those involved in state-sanctioned violence has been a challenge for a long time.
In its annual report for 2023 the Media Institute of Southern Africa documented the extent to which journalists had been intimidated and attacked. It reported that such incidents increased during election periods.
This was indeed the case in the 2024 pre-election period. Journalists faced arrests when, for example, reporting on police trying to disrupt opposition parties’ events.
Mozambique enjoys a diverse media landscape, including multiple private and local media outlets. Nevertheless, press freedom has been curtailed. An example has been the treatment of journalists investigating the armed conflict in Cabo Delgado. Soon after the conflict began in October 2017, the government barred journalists from visiting the province, and many of those reporting nevertheless were detained and held for extended periods or arrested for unsubstantiated charges.
Read more: Mozambique's long struggle to build a nation – four novels that tell the story
The case of Amade Abubacar made headlines in 2019 when he was detained and held for 13 days in military barracks without access to a lawyer. He was then charged with “violation of state secrets” and “public instigation to crime”.
What Abubacar did was report on the insurgency. Since then, the situation has got worse for the media. Last year, the Cabo Delgado governor Valige Tauabo accused unnamed journalists of colluding with the insurgents.
As I was writing this, news reached me that Arlindo Chissale, a journalist and political activist from Nacala, had been arrested, tortured and killed by the “death squads” mentioned earlier on 7 January 2025. Arlindo worked with me on researching the conflict in Cabo Delgado.
Freedom of the press is important to hold the new government accountable for the promises it has made to the Mozambican people.
The way forward
Chapo delivered a well-crafted inauguration address on 15 January. It was well crafted because, as some analysts commented, he incorporated many of the policies being advocated by Mondlane.
Read more: Venâncio Mondlane is Mozambique's political challenger: what he stands for
He said in his speech that he had heard what the protesters were telling him during the demonstrations. And he promised to promote unity, human rights and political dialogue to (re-)create social and political stability.
Chapo is also aware of the waves being made by Mondlane, who has recognised the political power of mobilising people around the issue of police violence. On his return to Mozambique, Mondlane presented the government with a list of demands to be implemented in the first 100 days of the new government. The first was that steps needed to be taken to stop the violence against the population.
Since his return he has also met victims of violence at the hands of the police and army.
The challenge is that Chapo’s party, Frelimo, which has been in power since independence in 1975, is strong and can severely curtail the president’s ability to introduce relevant reforms.
Read more: Mozambique's cycles of violence won't end until Frelimo's grip on power is broken
It’s therefore far from clear whether Chapo can pursue any of his suggested policy goals.
Dialogue with Mondlane is necessary. But if this leads to another “elite bargain” that might get him a cabinet position but does not benefit the common people, Mozambicans will not calm down. Any agreement must address the lack of accountability for police violence, stop political assassinations, and allow journalists to investigate political violence.
Corinna Jentzsch has received research funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
