Early in my public service, and after seven years of a teaching career, perhaps the best career in my life (except the money part, as we always felt as poor as the church mouse), I joined the Foreign Service in Maputo.
The diplomatic career is where my eyes were opened to the world outside, and I learned that Mozambique was not an isolated entity. There was a concert of nations. What I did not grasp as a Third Secretary and junior diplomat was who was in charge of conducting the concert. Foreign Minister Joaquim Chissano was at the time the boss of my boss. I learned to like and appreciate the opportunity to travel: Brazzaville, Kinshasa, Sally Portudal/Dakar, Pyongyang, Delhi (with its Palika Bazaar), Paris, Lisbon, Dar-es-Salaam, and a whole 3-year posting in Ethiopia. What impressed me the most was the firm, consistent position of Mozambique on national and international issues such as Western Sahara, Palestine, Diego Garcia, South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, and how Joaquim Alberto Chissano outside the country was talking the same language with Samora Machel inside and out.
I perceived my country as a country with principles. We were led by a vision and that made me stand with pride. Today, that vision we need.
Today, we feel that the example comes from the other side of the Continent, Mali, Burkina and Niger. As I stated in my earlier note on this situation[1], we need to wake up to the fact that we have fallen into an attitude of accommodating our needs to the demands of international capital, to managing the affairs of our country to please the neocolonial agenda. An agenda of big entities seeking energy security for their countries in Europe at any cost. We seem not to know that countries do not have permanent friends or enemies, but rather, permanent interests. And theirs is energy, to maintain 100% energy supply to their people, while in Mozambique, producing that energy, only 27% of the people have access to domestic energy (8 of the 30 million population with electricity[2]).
And what, pray, are the interests of Mozambique? We do not see any pronouncement that defines those for us. What we see, by contrast, is the exploitation of Mozambique by foreign capital, and the accommodation of the people governing us to this huge foreign capital, by taking advantage of it through the so-called Public-Private Partnerships. Incidentally, the public enterprises (of Mozambique) that benefit from these arrangements belong to families of those same people who negotiate the contracts on behalf of the country.
As it is therefore, and as far as they are concerned, things are fine. The people have their three meals a day, as stated by some public figure. Three meals? One wonders how the counting is done and by whom. But then we have been wondering about many other things.
Today however, I wish to establish a link between several world events in the last three years and pose a question: what is the place and role of Mozambique in defining a fair world? At least a fair and strong Africa? What is, in other words, our foreign policy and what is it intended to achieve? In asking these questions, we are suggesting that Mozambique ought to offer leadership in pursuing vigorously, not just its interests, but also those of an overexploited, despised and rich Continent, of people tragically caught in a vicious cycle of misery. We need to break this cycle and the moment cannot be better than now.
The African philosophy of ubuntu (uhutu) remains relevant here: I AM BECAUSE WE ARE. In other extended words, My being is defined by a collective of those that came before me, those that are with me and we define the future of our common humanity after we have left. Ours is a community philosophy. My child belongs to the entire village and the village elders have the right and duty to correct my child. My funeral is a community funeral in the same way as our marriage is a family and a village marriage. That is why they are invited: to witness and to strengthen that union.
As it is therefore, we find serious variance between the current proposition of human rights on the one hand, and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people on the other. It is so violently contradictory that those who are executing the genocide against the Palestinians keep reminding us of and force the world not to forget that they were themselves victims of genocide and antisemitism in Europe. Genocide has become a weapon of intimidation and a tool of blackmail for a few countries. Genocide is commemorated top keep others permanently feeling guilty and, on the defensive, whether they were or not closely (or remotely) linked to past events in faraway countries. And the same Europe that attempted to eliminate the Jews are now arming the Jews to eliminate the Palestinians. They have not understood that what Europe wants is to keep open the road to evacuating as many Jews from their territories as possible to outside of Europe. Israel might even wish to be considered as a European country, but it will never fully belong.
We are dealing with a Europe that has a culture of domination, violence and deception, including by the use of our own brothers.
Consider their standards
The military coup in Niger this year was severely condemned, sanctions imposed, the use of force to reverse the will of the people seriously considered and fueled. A few weeks later another military coup takes place in Gabon, and no condemnation, in fact, acceptance and encouragement of the new military leader is what happened. He is not being told of the urgency of holding the ubiquitous elections. As if elections were indeed any form of solution to the situation these coups tried to address.
Europe and the military complex in America were outraged by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, imposed heavy sanctions, blew up the Nord Stream, and armed Ukraine to defeat Russia. They went silent on the invasion of the Gaza Strip and the attempt at exiling the entire Palestinian population. In fact, they encouraged Israel diplomatically, financially and militarily (with weapons, bombs, shells and personnel); they even followed each other in visiting the Prime Minister in Tel Aviv to encourage him to continue the genocide. While giving billions of dollars to Israel to kill Palestinians, they now turn and give a few million for humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians. SELECTIVE HUMANITY. Even the logic seems self-defeating: why give hundreds of millions of dollars to a Palestinian people and give billions to Israel to eliminate the same Palestinian people?
They are the same that admitted Ukrainian refugees because “they have our blue eyes” and rejected Africans from the same influx.
And a well-financed mainstream Press that is quick to define who is right and who is wrong, who is “the good guy” and who is “the bad guy”. And they expect everyone else to fall within these defined boundaries. They define as mercenaries the Wagner group, being paid in gold, but they say nothing of France self-paying in our gold as well, or of Black Water as a mercenary group. They readily cry foul of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi but say nothing of Julian Assange in prison five years after staying locked for seven in an Embassy room! “Do you condemn Hamas?” is their opening question in any interview on the events in Palestine, formulated to demand and extract compliance with their view. And where do they leave history?
Eventually, when one looks to history, it is clear that neither Europe nor America can be our standard-bearers, or standard setters. They cannot even be value-definers for the rest of us anymore. What moral standing do they have, except that which our own leaders want to give them, by running like schoolchildren to meet one teacher in Paris or Washington (or Beijing or Sochi, or some such iteration as JICA may invent).
Who is redefining the morals and standards by which we should live? Who is going to restore credibility to a self-defined and self-entitled international community where standards are variable, depending on who is powerful and who is not?
These events have profoundly affected my reading of the international order now. Our views are changing very radically from the times we worked with pride in the United Nations System. We are now starting to read the Human Rights with different perspectives.
Which Human Rights? The current Universal Declaration of Human Rights, while they represent a positive piece of international law, were built on individual rights, reflecting the individualized culture of Europe and other Continents, but not necessarily taking also into account the African reality and culture: our culture is a community culture. Therefore if Human Rights were to be defined by Africa, they would be more communal than individual. For instance, the rights of the community to their land, are now being assaulted by individual enterprises that are buying communal land through negotiations with the capital, not at the local and District level. And our governments are allowing this. What happened in Tanzania with Maasai land, How gas and coal in Mozambique are managed by Maputo, with no say of the Provinces and Districts where these resources are extracted. And the consequent displacement of people from their lands. Regardless.
We are calling for Mozambique to exercise stronger more visible leadership and offer reflections to the Continent. We need to liberate ourselves, and to pass the message to those who exploit our energy resources (coal, oil and gas), that we need to change the relationship, without conflict. But it is unsustainable in the medium term and we cannot forever have basic problems of food, water, electricity, education and health, and still be sitting on huge resources, waiting for others to come extract them and ship them raw. Something is wrong and our intelligence is challenged. Are we intelligent enough? If so, what is missing?
Jose
Tete, January 2024
[2] https://observador.pt/2023/06/08/mocambique-entre-os-20-paises-com-maior-defice-de-acesso-a-energia/
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