Mozambique: Claims against Chissano shown to be untrue – AIM report

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Mozambique: Claims against Chissano shown to be untrue – AIM report

6:01 CAT | 04 Feb 2025

FILE - For illustration purposes only. Former President Joaquim Chissano speaks to the press on Heroes' Day 2025 in Maputo . [Photo: O País]

According to Venancio Mondlane, the man who claims he won the 9 October presidential election, former President Joaquim Chissano is “the father of corruption”.

In late 2024, in one of his live broadcasts via his Facebook page, Mondlane made a vituperative attack against Chissano, accusing him, for example, of ordering his ministers to charge a five per cent levy on all foreign investments. Mondlane presented no evidence for this claim.

Perhaps the most outrageous claim was that Chissano had opened an account in NewYork in which he deposited the 122.8 million dollars paid by the Brazilian mining company Vale for its majority share in the Moatize coal mines in the central province of Tete.

But this claim is susceptible to fact-checking. The independent newssheet “Carta de Moçambique” investigated and found that Mondlane’s allegation is entirely false.

In November 2004, Chissano’s government announced that Vale had won the international tender for the Moatize mines. The contract was signed between the Vale chairperson, Roger Agnelli, and Mozambique’s then Minister of Mineral Resources, Castigo Langa. Chissano witnessed the signing ceremony.

Agnelli and Langa posed for the cameras with a gigantic symbolic cheque for 122.8 million dollars – exactly the sum which Mondlane accused Chissano of pocketing, and depositing in a secret New York account.

“Carta de Moçambique” found that the money was, in reality, deposited in a Mozambican government bank account, in the name of the National Treasury Directorate, domiciled in the Bank of Mozambique itself. The bank records show that the money was transferred to the Treasury Directorate on 30 November 2004.

This was two months before Chissano left office. Anything that happened to this money after 30 November 2004 cannot logically be imputed to Chissano.

Mondlane also claimed that Chissano is the true owner of the tollgate located between the cities of Maputo and Matola on the N4 motorway to South Africa. The claim made by Mondlane and his followers is that the toll road was originally designed to end at the junction where the Matola branch of the Shoprite supermarket chain is located, and that it was only extended to Maputo to make money for Chissano from the tolls.

Again the claim is entirely fictional. The extension of the N4 highway to Maputo is covered by a Mozambican government decree dated 23 February 1999.

Prominent Mozambican lawyer Jose Caldeira, who advised the government in its negotiations with the South African company TRAC (Trans-Africa Concessions), which operates the motorway, said that the toll gate is located between Maputo and Matola, at the insistence of TRAC.

TRAC needed tolls from the traffic between Matola and Maputo to make the rest of the motorway, up to the South African border, viable. If the motorway were to stop at the Shoprite junction, then the concluding section of the road, from Shoprite into central Maputo, would be of low quality

Caldeira recalled that TRAC promised a high quality road along the entire length – but only if it could collect tolls from the Matola-Maputo traffic.

Caldeira said the government accepted the TRAC demand, partly because it did not have the funds to build the road itself, and partly because there is an alternative route between Matola and Maputo (via Jardim neighbourhood) which could be used by motorists who objected to paying the toll.

Regardless of whether this was the right decision, it had nothing to do with Chissano. The claim, repeated to this day, that Chissano owns the Maputo tollgate is simply untrue – but it is still used to justify not paying the toll.

Source: AIM