Calls for strikes / protests to coincide with Portuguese president’s visit to Mozambique

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Calls for strikes / protests to coincide with Portuguese president’s visit to Mozambique

4:25 CAT | 25 Apr 2016

Africa 21 (File photo) / President Filipe Nyusi photographed here with Portugal's president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on the day of his swearing in ceremony, in Lisbon, in March 2016

Anonymous calls for protests and strikes coinciding with Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s state visit to Mozambique are circulating on social networks, Portuguese news website Observador reported on Friday (April 22).

The Portuguese president lands in Maputo on 3 May for a four-day state visit which it is known will have a strong economic component, but which will also coincide with a period of tension in the Mozambican capital.

One specific call is for a national strike between 3 and 7 May. The anonymous text says: “It’s time to say enough! We will paralyze the country! Let’s stop for a whole week,” and is subtitled “People in Power” (Povo no poder), the title of a song by Mozambican social intervention rapper Azagaia.

Another campaign, which is being carried primarily by SMS, calls for a “mega-peaceful demonstration” on the 29 and 30 of May, and “for all Mozambican to take to the streets in rejection of war and corruption”.

This campaign proclaims: “Watchwords: prison for Guebuza and Chang; where the money is: end the war; we want tuna on the table.” (Armando Guebuza was president of the country for ten years before Filipe Nyusi, and Manuel Chang was his finance minister.)

The Ematum scandal which broke last year revealed high government borrowings in 2013 to finance a state-owned tuna fishing company, which were ultimately used to buy military equipment and were omitted from the state accounts.

This month, the Wall Street Journal revealed another concealed state-guaranteed loan to a state-owned company, causing the IMF to cancel the second tranche of a loan to the country, while admitting that their decision could affect the position of the international donors who pay a quarter of Mozambique’s budget.

The situation led Prime Minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosario to try to allay fears by posting on his Facebook page on Thursday,: “Do not get into panic, compatriots. We continue to focus on our labour and productive activities,”reads the article.

Prime minister Carlos Agostinho do Rosário

Nevertheless, anonymous calls via social networks and SMS for demonstrations in the country continue, in a formula already used in the past. In recent years Mozambique has witnessed some large scale demonstrations due to the serious social situation, and the ones from September 2010 were the most violent with people on the streets to protest against rising prices of water, electricity and bread. Two days of clashes between police and population resulted in 13 dead. These demonstrations were called by SMS.

According to the Observador, Mozambique “is experiencing a political-military conflict that has caused several casualties particularly in the north of the country, with tension beginning in October 2012, when the leader of the opposition (Renamo, the Mozambican National Resistance), Afonso Dhlakama, settled in his former military base in Gorogonsa after political disagreements with the ruling party, Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation front) over the revision of the electoral law,” adding that “the threat ended up in a military conflict that has lasted ever since”.

It is in this environment that the President of the Portuguese Republic Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa will be in Mozambique, reads the report. The Observador further states that it is “trying to get a position of the [Portuguese] presidency in the face of demonstrations and strikes expected in the country by the time of the state visit, but so far there has not yet been a response”.

Source: Observador