AS A UN STAFF, I AM TROUBLED

A.    To start

I am soon reaching my 69 years of life, this year and obviously I am retired.  I have had an eventful, satisfying, educating, successful, engaging public career as an international civil servant.  I now live a comfortable, no-regrets retirement, way above the average still-struggling Mozambican retiree.

So, I am not troubled by my personal comfort.  As a matter of fact, retiring into my country was a personal choice.  I could have retired and stayed abroad,  I have children in Canada, I have  properties in Tanzania.  But this is home.

Do I have health constraints?  Of course.  At this stage, most of us on the sunset side of the mountain of life, have essentially to battle with lifestyle morbidities,  the usual suspects: blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes B.  But there again, I have a good health insurance called After-Service Health Insurance.  That allows me not to avoid clinics, and I can afford a daily dose of that trio of pills that cost $3.4 per day or TShillings 9,000 or 215Moz Met, or a monthly 6,450Moz Met.

If you want to understand how lucky I am, consider that this is only expenditure on medicines. Add basic food, water and energy, you get an idea of the living costs. The average Mozambican retiree cannot afford that daily dose of medicines for the rest of his life.  So, what does he do?  He either finds medicinal roots and leaves  to manage health (and traditional medicine in our country is not so developed like in other African countries), or they buy time until hospital becomes absolutely inevitable.  In most cases, the last stop before being accompanied to what the Swahili call “Shamba la Mungu”, meaning, the farm of the Lord (less euphemistically and less faithfully, the cemetery).  Literally dying of poverty and leaving a bereaved family poorer, with hospital bills. 

All of that to say that my retirement life is above national average.

I am not sure we are condemned to live like this, as Mozambicans fifty years after independence, and for other countries in our continent, sixty five or more years. I am not sure we can simply say, that is our fate!  The youth are challenging the fatalist narrative with one of their own.  Somebody listen!

So, what troubles me?

• It is the national incongruences;

• It is the African paralysis;

• It is the totally discredited international community;

• The fact that continents that created standards by which international relations should be conducted do not live by those standards;

• It troubles me to see the challenge to the international system by those who

o   built it,

o   imposed it on “the rest of us”,

o   still force us to live by these standards while they do not,

o   and invented a new imperialist aggression tool called “Sanctions”.

And why should it bother a Mozambican retiree sitting pretty in a small town called Tete?

B.     National incongruences

I was born colonized, educated in a colonial system, held a Portuguese identity card, until in 1975 I was told that we were now free.   I proudly enjoy a Mozambican identity, my name changed from Antonio Jose to the fuller Antonio Jose Canhandula Ntengoipa Akazianyenga Phiri.  Then I discovered that my long name represented a whole family and ethnic  story.  Not just a name tag.  Independence, it felt, came to free us, to free me.

Fifty years of independence and looking around, I see very few of us living a better life.  Fifty years is a lifetime.  So, I ask myself upon returning home:

• Where are the promises?

• Where is all the national wealth going? 

• Why are the youth not getting employment?

• Why is education so poor?

• Why is health so unhealthy and our leaders get treatment abroad? 

• Why months of postelection demonstrations?

• Why so many people killed?

• Why is land being grabbed in huge chunks and privatized by absentee landlords sitting pretty in Maputo?

So many whys.

As far as I am concerned, national politics have become about a contest between parties, on which one can best privatize the state.  Water is private, electricity is private! And the sovereign?  Totally irrelevant to all parties. That is what troubles me. 

Which Mozambique will we be leaving to our successors two to three hundred years from now? The obsession with short-term electoral cycles has blinded us to our duty to future generations.  Our minds and political outlook have been hijacked by a 5-year (renewable, almost by entitlement) horizon. That is what troubles me.

So, after the 5+5 years, all policies and programmes are irrelevant to the next ruler.  They have really become rulers, not leaders.  Have you used a ruler in geometry?  You follow the line, or else…  That bothers me.

A country with seven major rivers, with 80% of the landmass fertile, it has to import food from South Africa. That bothers me.

A country that has a history of defeating colonialism militarily, defending its territorial integrity with foreign armies that have no exit timetable, that bothers me.

My life has sailed, so I contribute pretty little and have no ambition.  Still, the state of my country bothers me.

C.    African paralysis

I have put in writing my thoughts about our continent, the richest on earth, with the poorest people on the planet.  Rulers have stopped ruling and are busy enriching themselves and their families and friends.  Just an example of absurdity, the late Edgar Lungu, ex-President of Zambia, left in South Africa a fleet of 180 luxury cars.  Europe, Asia have understood the mind construct of our African rulers and have found ways of pleasing them, cajoling and blinding them, to allow the continuous free plunder of our wealth.  We’ve become a continental warehouse.  For our explorers, (euphemistically called “partners” because of the crumbles of money they leave behind), our minerals, our wood, our energy, our fish, are welcome, but we Africans are not welcome in their countries.

The youth is growing in numbers and in awareness.  You know, I know, they know, but somewhere along the line, one of us does not want to accept that the youth are setting themselves to change things.  Simple demographic force. What none of us knows is: when all is said and done, how violent will change have been? Leadership, not rulership, will determine how violence will be channeled into energy instead:  Do we know how to change violence into positive immense energy?

My answer: Biafra.  If the lessons of Biafra remain only for Nigeria, then we have not understood the capacity and depth of penetration of the forces behind the wars in South Sudan, in the Sudan, in Mozambique, in Congo, in Cameroon, etc.  Then we have not appreciated the depth of what Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are attempting, to exert African sovereignty over national resources.

I believe that our readers should heed what Professor Patrick Lumumba, Ambassador Arikana Chiombori, Nataly Yamb and others have been, and will continue saying: Africa should stop being the menu on the table for Europe, America or Asia.  Let us create our own space and bring our own chair to the table as an equal discussant.  And eat that dinner by right with pride and no explanations due to anyone over what is ours.

I would discuss much about this situation, but you can already follow my train of thought here, here, here, here and here.  That will give you a measure of what troubles me.

We need to make the AU an institution of the people, not a comfort club for leaders who feel they have become the unassailable sovereign.

The discredited international community

My entire education was driven to make me believe that systems are a necessary way of ordering, reviewing, living and interpreting relations between men and countries. I was lucky to join the United Nations in 1989 as an international civil servant.  And left 33 years later.

In the UN, my first letter of employment had an annex called “standards of conduct of the international civil Service”.  I read it, studied it, lived by it and transmitted it to others.

The UN System taught me to work according to standards and systems.  Order.  I participated actively in redefining, for our refugee programmes, the use of standards and Indicators in humanitarian programme delivery.  I applied  those and went as far as Pakistan, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya and other countries on a preaching campaign on the practical application  of standards and indicators in humanitarian settings.  That budgeting should be derived by a  logical framework invented by some European thinker, I repeated.

And so, I totally bought into the concept of order, of standard-setting, of examples, of icons, of an international community guided by a positive set of shared, common and accepted rules of fair behaviour and production.  And of the need for measures to ensure that deviations are corrected, bad behaviour repressed, exemplary behaviour recognized and emulated.

I fully accepted and want to continue believing that,

1. There is an international community.  But that (already) fuzzy concept has started to be used and weaponized to discipline the poor according to their culture and precepts.  Failing in the tactic of shaming, they started an industry of sanctions.  And all of us know that sanctions only work from strong to weak, from rich to poor. Sanctions against those who think, feel and approach their own issues differently.  In fact, for being different, damn it!

   
   

2. We were all convinced that there was need for an International Court of Justice, until we all realized two things:

   1. Only small countries are forced into its jurisdiction;

   2. Big countries are not even signatories, after they railroaded us small African countries into signing for it, believing in it and being regimented by it.  Instead, to protect their citizens, they have been imposing on us extra-territoriality agreements.

   
   

3. There was need for climate action.  Until we realized that the rich polluting countries want to be exempted and continue pollution, by enticing us not to even start polluting, thus sacrificing our industrialization, through what is called “climate financing”.  Northern countries buy our pollution deficits (called credits) as license to continue polluting and maintaining their industries, repress our development, by offering us more expensive technology that we cannot reproduce or repair by ourselves, so that raw materials continue to be cheap for them.  Somebody is still calling this climate justice!

   
   

   That bothers me.  And if I am alone, so be it.

   
   

4. Then there was the weaponization of democracy to invade and destroy the economies of Haiti, Cuba, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan…. the string is long.

   
   

   Why should democracy be fostered by  the American army? And when our small armies in Niger, Burkina and Mali went to ascertain African agency over their own territories, resources and policies, they are demonized and the western press spends huge monies gaslighting us Africans into adopting the expression “junta”.

   
   

   Is democracy actually not a Trojan Horse for re-colonization?  I am afraid we will find out soon enough.

   
   

5. And we have been entertaining the Israel phenomenon.  War against the Palestinian people for more than  80 years now, and now a war imposed on Iran:  Israel decided one day to bomb Iran because this country is nearing the construction of a nuclear bomb.  The rest of the long story is known, it has been saying that Iran is nearing an atomic bomb for the last 20 years.

   1. Israel has nuclear bombs and nobody cries it should not.

   2. Iran hosted an IAEA inspection team all these years observing the nuclear program.  Israel would not allow none of that.

   3. Iran responded to the aggression and our European friends called for Iran to “exercise restraint”!  What rotten logic for us to swallow?  What about telling Israel not to attack?  Well they cannot, because Israel is a Euro-American colony. For the last year Israel has been committing genocide and destroying all infrastructure in the Gaza strip: hospitals, universities, refugee camps, starving the population.  And further robbing Palestinian territories in West Bank. 

What did America, France, the UK, Germany do, those self-appointed pillars of the international community?  They provided and will continue to provide more ammunition, bombs, military planes and diplomatic bluff to prolong the genocide.  Israel is a huge military base to oppress and dominate, not only the Palestinian people, but the entire Middle East.

For all of the above, I am troubled.

When Rusia was ready to sign and agreement with Ukraine 3 years ago, for the protection of Russian populations in Ukraine and security in the region, Europe rushed to kill the agreement and start a war.  Today, enjoying the spoils of sanctions (300 billion dollars of Russian money in European banks), Europe does not want to stop the war.  Who is the  warmonger? I am troubled by a continent that spends time and money gaslighting us into believing that they are the standard-bearers:  of which  international community, I ask you?

Who has any remaining moral standing to continue teaching us about their democracy, about rules in which we believed and still consider to be the best anchor against chaos in the world?  We want to believe in standards by which everybody lives.  I am troubled.

Having worked the best part of my youth for the United Nations, these questions affect me because the UN represents the convening power of the international community.  I am proud of the UN, because I know it, I worked for its ideals.  The UN was created primarily to maintain international peace and security after the devastation of European War II. It was also intended to foster international cooperation on various global issues and to promote human rights. The UN's founders aimed to prevent future global conflicts and create a more stable and just world order.  They are the ones feeding the current war in Europe, the current war in the Middle East.  I am troubled.

If anyone has started wars, it is those same countries that are expected to foster peace.  That troubles me.

If we cannot prevent war, if our standards of fairness are to be observed only by the weak, the Palestinian, the Syrian and other poor and weak, he attacked, I am troubled.

I am troubled, and so should the reader.  They seem to tell us that might is right.  Then, we need a different order, we need to save the UN Charter, one way or the other. Who else will give us that leadership?

Canhandula,

Tete, July 2025