Profile: Filipe Nyusi, the sometimes impulsive, pragmatist technocrat on the way to re-election

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Profile: Filipe Nyusi, the sometimes impulsive, pragmatist technocrat on the way to re-election

6:07 CAT | 25 Sep 2017

Filipe Nyusi may have started his meteoric rise to the leadership of the Mozambican state as a relative unknown, but his three-year term in office has revealed a pragmatic if sometimes impulsive man.

The current leader of the Mozambican Liberation Front (Frelimo), the party in power in Mozambique since independence, is now the only candidate for his own succession at the party’s 11th congress beginning on Tuesday in Matola, Maputo.

After a stint as Minister of Defence and without a remarkable career in the Frelimo (Liberation Front of Mozambique) hierarchy – unlike his three predecessors in the presidency – Filipe Nyusi’s baptism of fire took the form of his emancipation by Armando Guebuza, who ceded the presidency of the Republic to him in January of 2015 after ten years in the post, but held on to the direction of the party in the power.

Many thought Guebuza’s holding on to the party leadership at the time of Nyusi’s inauguration would restrain the new president’s freedom of action and confirm the idea of a leader dominated by Frelimo’s previous upper echelon.

But against all expectations, Armando Guebuza was forced to leave the Frelimo presidency, ceding place to Filipe Nyusi in March 2015 and recording his first victory in the fight for control of a party that in Mozambique is in many respects conterminous with the state, as several commentators have noted.

Living up to promises in his inauguration speech to promote a more inclusive country, in the early days of his term, Filipe Nyusi met the leader of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), Afonso Dhlakama – who had refused to concede defeat in the general elections – and Daviz Simango, the leader of the Democratic Movement of Mozambique (MDM), Mozambique’s third largest political party.

His unscheduled, informal style came to light when he appeared one Saturday afternoon in the old, dilapidated fish market in the Costa del Sol neighbourhood in Maputo, talking to sellers without media presence. Images taken by an amateur videomaker were distributed to the press.

He has sat down with children on classroom floors several times to show solidarity with those who study in such conditions, and given lessons in mathematics, a discipline that he taught for a time at the Pedagogical University.

A soccer lover to the point of having been national champion as president of Ferroviário de Nampula, Nyusi participated in some friendly games as a member of the government team and played a few minutes in inaugural games of school championships.

A technocrat and admirer of science in the management of public institutions, to the detriment of what he calls “the guessing game”, it was to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that he turned to find the current governor of the Bank of Mozambique, Rogério Zandamela, and to the African Development Bank (ADB) for Mateus Magala to lead the strategic Mozambique Electricity (EDM), going against the grain of Frelimo’s traditional mistrust of cadres leaving the country to pursue careers abroad.

A trainee engineer with a managerial career in the Mozambique Railways (CFM), he has been pragmatic in dealings with international financial institutions over the issue of the hidden debt left by the previous government, almost never mentioning the word self-esteem, much to the liking of his predecessor Armando Guebuza.

His realism led him in August to an unprecedented meeting with Afonso Dhlakama in the bush of Gorongosa district in central Mozambique, where the Renamo leader is taking refuge in another action aimed at achieving “effective peace ” in the country.

Visits to state-owned companies in the style of first Mozambican president, Samora Machel, have revealed an impulsive Filipe Nyusi, delivering strong reprimands to managers of state-owned enterprises over the condition such firms are in.

“How can anyone with a bus ready to operate on a particular route be prevented by [allegedly] having two other three private partnership operators?” the head of state demanded to know after visiting the national carrier Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique (LAM) and Maputo Municipal Transport Company (EMTM) in April.

And he froze an Advisory Council meeting at the Ministry of Transport and Communications when he censured a journalist filming him on a mobile phone. A sign of the discomfort he feels, his security protocol forbids the recording of images of him in this way, as has been seen on several public occasions. With Filipe Nyusi, visitors’ phones, including journalists’, are banned within the presidency.

Yet despite this apparent phobia, Nyusi recently opened a Facebook account where he answers questions posed by users of the social network. The Frelimo congress that begins on Tuesday may be the consecration of a man who will need more than the skills of his engineering training to solve the Herculean problems with which the country is grappling.

Source: Lusa