by David Martin
Mozambique, at 20, can at last begin to plan a post-independence future that will enable it to become a contributing partner in regional development.
With peace in the countryside and the opposition in parliament instead of in the bush, the government established after last year’s multi-party elections wants to strengthen democratic institutions, develop human resources and infrastructure, and create a climate for financial investment and economic growth.
Already the effects of peace are being felt in the towns but it takes longer for this to trickle down to the rural areas.
Armando Marais is also 20. He was born in April 1975, two months before Mozambique became independent, in a village 70 kilometres south-west of the Manica Province capital of Chimoio. He remembers little of those heady days of 20 years ago when ideals dictated realities and Mozambique set out to create a new man (women were rarely mentioned} building around him a socialist society devoid of traditional institutions.
For Marais, life was about survival. War, initiated by Southern Rhodesia and fine-tuned with savage ferocity by South Africa, ebbed and flowed across his homeland. Both Marais’ parents were killed in the war. His brother, then only 11, disappeared and he has no idea whether he is alive or dead.
Soon after his parents’ deaths and his brother’s disappearance, Marais fled to Zimbabwe. There he became a statistic, one of the two million Mozambicans who escaped to the neighbouring countries.
Today, Marais has been repatriated to his village ·- a returnado, as they are known in Mozambique. And for him, today, life is much as it was when he was born.
There is still no school or health post for the community of 150 people. Both were built after his birth, largely through self-help, and destroyed during the war. There is no clean drinking water, electricity, telephone or paved road. The village store, one of the few permanent structures in the community, is a blackened and bullet-pocked skeleton, another legacy of the war.
Yet, amidst this scene of devastation totally devoid of what is called development, there is a ray of hope.
As a refugee in Zimbabwe, Marais was taught technical skills as a carpenter. Others learned brick-making and building, metal-working, weaving, and were given very basic education. In Marais’s community, and indeed along much of Mozambique’s 800-kilometre eastern border with Zimbabwe, the embryonic signs of a slow, people-driven revolution are emerging.
New homes are taking shape, more permanent and less crude than those they fled. Fields are being tilled, despite the estimated two million lethal landmines seeding Mozambique’s landscape.
There will soon be a school and a clinic and, they hope, a teacher and a health worker. There may soon be a shop. There is also the question of the rains, the dictator of all things in rural Africa. A drought is in prospect this year following on the devastating one in 1992/3. And will the rains next year be better? Will the peace hold after 30 years of war?
In Maputo, the government and donors are still taking stock of the real cost of the war, initially for independence from Portuguese colonialism and then against the Mozambique National Resistance (MNR or Renamo).
Mozambique, says the United Nations, is the world’s poorest country. The country’s infrastructure is destroyed. Maps still show roads which no longer qualify for that description. Railways, bridges, factories and state enterprises lie in ruins. But behind this imagery lies yet another sign of hope.
After two years of protracted negotiations in Rome, peace was finally secured and Mozambique’s first multi· party elections followed. Joaquim Chissano won the Presidency fairly easily although it was a
much closer call for his Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) party, which won just over half of the seats in parliament
The President confronted his new mandate with astonishing decisiveness. Most of the old·guard Frelimo politicians were dropped from government and replaced by younger technocrats. The new Prime Minister is the former foreign minister, Dr. Pascoal Mocumbi, a medical doctor and long·time associate of Chissano.
Most of the refugees like Marais have returned to their country and those who were internally displaced can, generally, now go home. With international assistance, new blue-washed schools are springing up in places like the Tete Corridor connecting Zimbabwe and Malawi.
Houses, some draped with UNHCR tarpaulins, are evident as communities begin the long task of rebuilding their lives. New health posts are being built and destroyed ones reconstructed. Roads are being repaired, bridges rebuilt, railways re-laid and industries resurrected.
The mood of the international development agencies is also changing. A year ago, they were conspicuously suffering from fatigue, wearied by the years of construction and destruction which was the hallmark of the war.
In part this has been brought about by the changing of the old guard among the diplomats also. Yesteryear’s tired critics are gradually giving way to a new fresher generation cognisant of Mozambique’s enormous potential.
Mozambique is one of the best-watered countries on the African continent, with vast untapped mineral resources. Its railways and ports provide the gateway to the sea for the landlocked hinterland, and its people are proud and passionate.
Marais remains stoic about his suffering. His eyes are set firmly forward, not backwards. For him, it is a new country after the past two decades of war.(SARDC)
