Mud in Mozambique

from Le Monde Diplomatique

Mozambique ranks 168 out of 177 countries in the United Nations development index, with 54% of its people below the poverty line. Yet the statistics are improving – the economy has a steady annual 8% growth rate and there are megaprojects coming on line.

By Colin Murphy

A girl runs down a dust path, Santa hat on her head, whistle in her mouth. Ahead, Maputo’s lumpen-expatriate community disperses through the shantytown, shouting to each other. “Are you?” “Checking, checking.” “On on!” Locals emerge from their houses, of corrugated iron sheeting or adobe, to watch a convoy of white people, flaunting their white skin in skimpy running gear, flowing past. The runners carry sweets and peanuts, and throw them to the barefoot children who stop to watch and cry out “Azungo!”

Admira is bathing her children and washing their clothes in a large puddle at the side of the road. I ask what are things like here. “There’s no water. There’s no road. It’s difficult to get sick people to the hospital.” Has she seen things improve? “A little. The floods in 2000 destroyed everything. Now we’re more or less normal again.” She says it dismissively, gestures to her washing and three children in the brown water.

Ahead, the runners have turned off the path and on across a private golf course, following a trail set earlier. I leave Admira to her laundry and run to catch them up.

“Azungos are always white people, your colour,” says Vitorinho Gusinho. “All the people who come from Europe, who are this colour, we call azungos. A white who is born in Mozambique is a Mozambican, but we call him azungo as well. Sometimes, when a black is rich, when he walks with the powerful people, the businessmen, we also put him in with the azungos. Because us Africans are always under-developed, many of us don’t eat regularly, so when there’s one of us who gets to eat lunch and dinner, well he’s an azungo.” He laughs heartily.

I need to buy minidiscs for my recording equipment and find them in Tiger Video, a three-storey electronics superstore on the corner of Karl Marx and Ho Chi Min avenues. Tiger also sells wide plasma-screen televisions for $8,000: they sell about one a month, the assistant says. They don’t do credit.
Socialism postponed

Paul Fauvet came to Mozambique as a journalist in 1980 to observe “the construction of socialism”. Instead, the new state found itself fighting a war of destabilisation, run by apartheid South Africa. Fauvet stayed, working for the government press agency. His return to Britain suffered the same fate as the socialist project: it was “postponed”, he said wryly.

“The international situation nowadays is hostile to such projects. We are in a period of global capitalism, in a period in which it has become extremely difficult to challenge certain orthodoxies. And of course we no longer have what used to be called our safe rear guard: we no longer have the Soviet bloc to fall back on.”

Mozambique’s infrastructure was devastated during the war, its economy already crippled by the overnight departure of the Portuguese (who had been most of the professional and mercantile class) after independence in 1975. Struggling to rebuild, it suffered many setbacks. In 1995 the World Bank imposed as a condition for a $400m loan that it stop its protection of cashew processing, then one of the key indigenous industries. The industry collapsed. In 2000 and 2001 parts of the country were hit by devastating floods; the threat of flooding is ever-present and small-scale crises are an annual event.

Mozambique today is ranked 168 out of 177 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index, which compares poverty and health statistics. In 10 years it has climbed just three places, clawing its way above Chad, the Central African Republic and Guinea-Bissau.

Yet Paul Fauvet is “reasonably optimistic”. He crunches the numbers: household survey statistics in 1997 showed 69% of the population living below the poverty line; by 2003 it had fallen to 54%. Almost half of the country’s budget of $400m comes from foreign aid, but the economy has been growing at a steady 8% a year.

Tourism is booming and there are many mega-projects coming on stream or already operational: a huge aluminium plant on the outskirts of Maputo, natural gas exploitation, the rehabilitation of the sugar industry and a new dam on the Zambezi.
‘No chaos to compare’

“That war was like none they had ever heard of before”, wrote Mozambican novelist Mia Couto in Sleepwalking Land. “There was no other chaos to compare with that which ruled there, not even the old battles in which slaves were stolen to be sold on the coast.”

On a notice board in the Concern office in Quelimane, 1,000 km north of Maputo, is a hand-drawn problem tree for the “livelihoods programme”. They are:

Weak sense of ownership.
Weak access to information.
Weak knowledge of their rights.
Weak preparation to do business.
Weak negotiating power.
Weak social capital.
Limited vision.
Limited contacts with influential people.
Limited self-confidence.
Social marginalisation.
Low status.

“Twenty-plus years ago, we saw tractors strewn all across Africa. At the time it seemed: you put in a tractor, you can till more land, you can produce more food, which means you have less people hungry. But you see, 20-plus years later, tractors broken down all across Africa because of lack of maintenance.” That’s what Tom Wright thinks; he is the country director in Maputo for the charity Concern Worldwide, and a former diplomat.

“And hand pumps. It’s so goddamn simple. I’ve seen hand pumps across Africa that are broken down, not for the sake of a washer or a valve, but because communities don’t have the wrench to open them. The wrench is in the store in the nearest town but the community haven’t put the money together. And yet if you go back to that community and you say ‘but we agreed that there’d be a maintenance fund for doing this’, well, the key person that was involved in this, they’ve left the community . . . I suppose it’s like a child growing up and learning: it’s with constant repetition that we actually learn. It’s the same with the community: to go in once, help them put in a hand pump, train them how to do maintenance, is not sufficient: you have to go back, possibly again and again and again.

“So we’re still making mistakes but we’re getting it more right, we’re improving all the time in development. But development is not an easy game, it’s a difficult business. You have to have patience, you have to work at the pace of the community, you cannot force change. If you’re talking about empowering people, if you’re talking about giving people confidence, you have to do it at their pace.”
The council meets

The school council meets in a large warehouse building, an old Catholic Church structure of four crumbling walls, most of it open to the air, a corrugated iron roof covering one third. This is the administrative office for the local school. The classrooms are a collection of huts outside, with walls made from the branches of coconut trees, roofs made from braided coconut tree fronds and supporting beams made from the coconut tree trunks.

School materials are stored at the end of the warehouse that has a roof: a pile of dog-eared schoolbooks, some new blackboards, a collection of ceramics made by children in a pottery class, tables and chairs, a stapler, calculator and clock, a poster of the circulatory system, grass mats.

The council members sit on a long bench. As the position of the sun changes overhead during the meeting, they stand up and move their bench into the shade. Sr Mwinga, the senior member of the council, makes a speech, long, grave and gracious. “Before, the parents didn’t have any say in the running of the school. The teachers were those who had the most say. Now, it’s the reverse. The council orients, directs and manages the school. Concern comes to educate, not just to give.”

Then he addresses the facilities around him: this is the “mother school”, founded by the Italian Capuchin friars who came here in the 1940s and spread out from here into the neighbouring districts. Yet, this meeting is in a building with just a third of a roof, the classrooms in huts. Why not build a new school?

An older member of the council speaks: “In other districts, there are new schools financed by Concern, but here, from where it started, we don’t have one. It looks like we haven’t reached independence yet.”
‘I want a good future for my children’

In a neighbouring district, a new school building is nearing completion. Suraya’s house overlooks it. She thinks it is a good thing; she left school in eighth grade, aged 16, because she got married and had a child, but now her husband is a drunk and she wants to go back and finish high school.

Her house is built from rough adobe, with no windows, and a roof of woven reeds. It has a front room leading into a small corridor with two bedrooms off it. These are the contents: a table; a battery radio; a flask; some buckets; a pot with water in it; a mat; two live chickens; a History of Mozambique poster; a box with clothes in it; two beds, made, with torn mosquito nets; a hoe. Water comes from a nearby well, though Suraya complains it is difficult to get it because it’s so busy.

She laughs when I ask about electricity. I ask her about the state of the country. “Mozambique is going well,” she says. “Many things are appearing that we’ve never seen before in our lives. I don’t know — in the past, the older people, who’ve since died [may have seen these things], but me, I never saw them. Nice things. Schools, hospitals, district offices are appearing — and before, nothing.”

What does she hope for her children’s future?

“We’ll see. God knows. These days, people are dying a lot. I don’t know if they’re going to grow up or not. If they grow up, I want a good future for them.”

Binda has his accountant’s hat on: he works in one of the embassies. Under the hat is a mass of dreadlocks; as his alter ego, Jah Bee, he is a respected musician.

“Development, for me, is peace and bread on the table for everybody. Bread doesn’t necessarily mean bread itself, but whatever brings a spiritual feeling of peace among human beings . . . Peace and chances for harvesting, for work in the fields, to produce things, so that they can provide food, and the basic human needs. These are all the factors that help the man walk with honour and know his own culture and integrity, to be proud to be himself, not to be dependent on aid from anybody else.”
‘Our nightly bread’

At 2am, the narrow street in Maputo’s Baixa (“low”) district is packed. The first, packed, bar is a pole-dancing club. The second is almost empty: some guys playing pool, a few bored hookers and a Pierce Brosnan movie on the big screen. The third, the Central, is where it’s at: no pole dancing, no whoring expats, just local young people having a good time. I get dancing with a girl, friendly and shy. After a dance, she excuses herself apologetically. John is busier in a corner.

“They’re all on the game, man,” he says later, as we leave. “It’s a con. She’s playing the good girl con.” Outside, the bouncer explains the system: there’s a door in the back where you bring the girl, and the man behind the door lets you go upstairs to a room for $20. “Any of the women in there?” asks John. “Any of them,” says the bouncer.

The women in Maputo call it “our nightly bread”. It’s a pun on the words of the Our Father, the Christian prayer: “Give us, this day, our daily bread.”

A Strategic Conflict Assessment of Mozambique, commissioned by the British government aid agency, Dfid, last April:

“Despite the appearance of a multi-party state, in practice Mozambique is controlled by an oligarchy within the ruling party which purchases support through patronage, much of which derives from aid . . . The dilemma is that a sudden withdrawal or reduction of donor aid is itself one of the potential shocks that could trigger conflict but maintaining the flow of aid uncritically will compound the underlying problems of governance . . .

“One of the problems is that Mozambique has been categorised by donors as a success. With so many disappointments in Africa, and aid budgets rising, Mozambique will be expected to absorb yet more funds and there is a danger that funding will increase regardless of capacity. Aid may fuel greater demands for patronage on a wider and more lavish scale, exacerbating competition among greed elements and increasing the grievances of poorer people. In many ways Mozambique is still a fragile state.”
‘It’s getting better’

“It’s not fragile, it’s strong, it’s getting better.” Tom Wright regards the report as having a glass half empty perspective. “Of course, you can pick holes in what government are doing here — remember that you don’t have the capacity here that you would have even in a lot of other African countries. It is a relatively new country, it’s only really 14 years out of a vicious civil war. The size of Mozambique, from north to south, is the equivalent of from Dublin to Moscow. Mozambique is not going to make it out of poverty overnight.

“Sometimes it’s very difficult to measure [our work] because it’s difficult or impossible to see. It’s not just that we’re transferring knowledge, we’re trying to instil confidence in local groups of people and individuals, we’re trying to empower people, and it’s difficult to measure that.

“The longer I’ve spent in Mozambique, the more conscious I am of having grown up in the west of Ireland, where we had real poverty 35, 40 years ago. We had no running water, there were very few houses with electricity. As a kid going to primary school, you had to do your work on the farm before you went to school. Even those who have never experienced famine — it is somehow in our culture, that we’re never really sure where the next meal is going to come from. We still have that attitude in Ireland, we understand, it’s in our roots, this poverty, this famine. We understand it better than other cultures.”

The Gil Vicente is an airy, modern bar in Maputo with a reputation for live music. The band takes a break as we arrive and a projector screen whirrs down from the ceiling. Then Bono is there, above the bar. He says: “This is not just an American dream. Or a European dream. Or an Asian dream. It’s also an African dream.” Behind him, an image of the continent of Africa, and then the Red Cross, and then the flags of Africa, beam up a curtain of lights, and he sings: “I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside.” A woman in a bandana and white hot pants, purple in the fluorescent lighting, lifts her arm and swings it around.

“I think I prefer Asia,” says one of my colleagues.