Mozambique: Félix repairs engines in 48 hours, but cannot escape the mud of Maputo

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Mozambique: Félix repairs engines in 48 hours, but cannot escape the mud of Maputo

2:56 CAT | 14 Nov 2022

All photos: Luisa Nhantumbo/Lusa

Thirty-two-year-old Félix Alferes has one of the most difficult jobs in the world today: 48 hours to open the engine of a Toyota Noah that has “collapsed” and return it, repaired, to its owner.

A challenge involving dozens of pieces that requires experience and precision.

“We have to open the crankshaft,” he says aloud from under the vehicle, with one of his tools in hand, amidst the roar of other cars in the repair area.

He gets up, picks up the toolbox he carries around, choosing each one carefully to open the engine compartments, one by one, rhythmically.

The frenzy is contagious to those who walk around between cars being repaired, and recalls the scene in the pit lane at a big motor-sports competition.

But Praça da Paz, in Maputo, is an open-air place, full of mechanical sliding around on cardboard in the mud under cars with second-hand parts in their hands – here, nobody has new parts.

“I couldn’t relate school and work,” says Alferes, a school dropout account typical among young Mozambicans.

The entire crankshaft job will cost “only” 4,000 meticais, considerably cheaper than a conventional auto repair, like the ones Alferes always dreamed of performing.

“I have a really big plan, but I don’t have the funds. I wanted to open a business, have at least three or four employees,” but, with interest rates above 20%,everything comes up against the difficulty of accessing credit in an underdeveloped financial market, with low general literacy levels.

The population of Mozambique is expected to double to 60 million by 2050, of which 55% will be under the age of 25.

As international organisations regularly point out, this is a demographic opportunity, but there are structural problems. “Population growth continues to outpace the expansion of education and employment possibilities for young people,” United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) resident representative in Mozambique Andrea Wojnar warned in 2021.

Even those who prove themselves mechanical aces are more likely than not to end up in precarious work, in the open, in the rain or sun as in Praça da Paz, fuelled by the desire to support their family.

The oil-stained floor, the parts scattered everywhere and the dozens of parked vehicles with open hoods show a perennial reality that passes from parent to child.

Alferes is among the dozens of young people who decided to embrace mechanics to escape unemployment, repairing vehicles with used parts on the streets of the Mozambican capital, in an increasingly “complicated” economic context with vertiginous global inflation.

The bumpy streets make shock absorber and suspension problems those most often diagnosed by the “street mechanics”.

“But everything gets resolved here,” stresses Francisco Cândido, 30, who is getting ready to change the spark plugs of another car in ‘Peace Square’.

The spark plugs Francisco needs can be bought on any corner of the square, and he guarantees that if the vehicle has any problems after it has been repaired, the customer can always come back.

“We work on the basis of trust. The customer can always come back,” he says, opening another hood to check a motor’s condition.

“They charge us reasonable prices and that’s why we tend to come here,” explains customer Alírio Júnior after Cândido fixes one of his car’s headlights.

“Lots of people don’t have the money to go to official car repair shops, so they use us,” says João Tembe, another young mechanic in the square.

Tembe learned mechanics from his father and has been in the business for 15 years. He set up an “auto bodywork repair shop” very close to the square.

“The challenge is enormous, but it is possible to support a family. As young people, we cannot cry with our arms folded, we have to face life,” he says.