(Bloomberg) -- On Tuesday, charismatic Mozambican opposition leader Venâncio Mondlane delivered a fiery speech that’s set his nation on a knife’s edge.
“At this moment, there is an opportunity — a climate — a revolutionary atmosphere surrounding Mozambique,” he said to 850,000 viewers on his Facebook page. “When the revolutionary atmosphere is present, it means we also need revolutionary leadership.”
Now Mondlane has made the funeral on Wednesday morning of his lawyer — murdered in a hail of 25 bullets last week by unidentified gunmen — a clarion call for the disaffected youth of the country the day before the electoral commission is set to announce results for the Oct. 9 election he says was rigged and observers say was marked by irregularities. His talk of revolution building in a country where one party has ruled for almost half a century carries the risk of arrest — or worse.
“Mozambique is on the brink,” said Adriano Nuvunga, director at the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Maputo, the capital of a country long used to electoral fraud and the violence that often follows. “The level of volatility and people ready for anything is very high.”
One of the world’s poorest countries, the southeast African nation is also home to some of its richest natural gas reserves, and a $20 billion plan by TotalEnergies SE to exploit them. The election, in which Mondlane trails ruling party candidate Daniel Chapo by a wide margin, according to provisional official tallies, may weigh on investors’ comfort with resuming the project that an Islamic State-linked insurgency halted in early 2021.
Citizens had already heeded Mondlane’s call for demonstrations on Monday, with rocks, burning tires and teargas canisters strewn across Maputo’s streets. Armored personnel carriers roared through the city’s poorer areas, while a police helicopter circled above. Mondlane said authorities used live ammunition against citizens — claims the government has denied.
Local civil groups have decried numerous irregularities in the election. A European Union observer mission said Tuesday its members were blocked from witnessing vote tabulation in some districts and provinces, as well as at the national level. It pointed to “unjustified alteration of election results.”
Investors are already responding, with the country’s dollar bonds due in 2031 falling for a third day on Tuesday, dropping 1.8% to 86 cents on the dollar, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Frelimo Dominance
Mondlane, who describes himself as a reluctant evangelical pastor and politician, became a household name through his sharp political commentary on TV. His stunning rise to become Frelimo’s main challenger has come with little resources or party infrastructure.
The candidate and his Podemos party have rallied support from young people in a country where the median age is about 17 in its effort to unseat the Mozambique Liberation Front — or Frelimo — which has ruled since independence from Portugal in 1975.
He quit the main opposition Mozambican National Resistance after it blocked his attempt to stand as its presidential candidate. That party, which fought a brutal 16-year civil war that left as many as a million dead, appears to have lost its position as the main opposition party to the much smaller Podemos.
Frelimo dominates politics and business in the former socialist state, where the two often intermingle. The party has for the past decade presided over increasing poverty and a $2 billion corruption scandal that rocked the country in 2016, freezing critical financing from donors and the International Monetary Fund.
Mondlane promised greater local benefits from Mozambique’s natural resources, and said he’d renegotiate contracts with multinationals. The authorities had blocked him on a technicality from standing as a candidate of another small party, and the truck carrying his campaign equipment was set ablaze on a September night.
He’s proved a master of social media, with more than 150,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, and used it to great effect in his campaign.
But with his comments on Tuesday saying the country was ripe for revolution, Mondlane is at best daring the government to respond.
“Given Mozambique’s history of civil war and insurgent violence, calling for revolution is reckless,” said Menzi Ndhlovu, an analyst at Cape Town-based risk consultancy Signal Risk. “We have seen how quickly rhetoric can spiral into unrest in politically charged situations such as Mozambique.”
As the country prepared for Dias’s funeral, Mondlane’s supporters were preparing for a potential showdown with the authorities. This week, he evoked memories of the Mozambican rapper Azagaia — meaning spear — who’s own funeral last year turned into a youth protest and a violent confrontation with the police.
Mondlane on Monday night posted that he’s in an unspecified location, using the same phrase that the late Renamo rebel leader Afonso Dhlakama used about a decade ago before returning to Gorongosa in central Mozambique, from where he’d spent years waging war against the state.
“I’m in an uncertain place,” he said.
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