A SWIPE AT THE NOOSE AROUND OUR NECKS[1]
I. INTRODUCTION
I wrote an article about the African Development Bank in Mozambique (ADB) addressed to my national readership. In it, I endeavoured to prove that the only African essence of that Bank is the name and its employees. Otherwise, it aligns with, and represents another iteration of international finance’s traditional way of dealing with Africa: repeatedly declaring friendly partnership, while reinforcing the perpetuation of a lopsided economic order. You can read it here. And hopefully, it will have reached the ADB Representative in Maputo. Maybe I will translate it, because it really applies to all African countries, including the North Africa group.
I also wrote another article on how in small doses, the United Nations is being dragged to cover processes that entrench a neocolonial system that appears benevolent and willing to help but has a very different objective: reinforce and perpetuate the current international order. You can read it here.
Moreover, I produced a review of the National Development Strategy for Mozambique 2025-2044, which, again, is in Portuguese and can be accessed here. In it, I made several extensive points, the most important of which could be summarized as follows:
The increase in the Prime Lending Rate by the central bank in Mozambique in 2023 raised to 18.6% and 20.5%, thus forcing local commercial banks to lend at even higher rates.
The increase in inter-bank obligatory deposits into the central Bank to 39% of the deposit holdings in national currency and 39.5% of holdings in foreign currency.
Both actions drained the money circulation from the economy, withdrawing the oxygen from small and medium enterprises, favouring only mega-projects. Wittingly or unwittingly working against the national strategy.
The absence of a role for the central bank in the whole national endeavour.
A strategy for reducing poverty, not daring to work towards eliminating it. Consequently, most of the targets in the strategy feel like we are being mobilized to protect poverty from disappearing.
A strategy where demography is presented as a problem that needs to be resolved, not as an important national productive asset. Viewed from that negative angle, anyone can understand why the government is insensitive to the fact that every year some 300,000 youth enter the labour market, of which only less than 14,000 find employment.
The strategy wants to control birth, instead of adopting a social strategy of education and options that do not exercise violence upon the human person. Demography, people are a burden to the economy. One is therefore entitled to ask – whose economy is it then?
II. FINANCING FOR DEVELOPMENT[2]
I said above that I am taking aim at a noose around our neck. I wrote earlier, as I said, of the ADB. I also wrote about blue-investing. I wrote as well about the Tax Inspectors Without Borders (under cover of the Untied Nations, indicated and referenced above). Despite (or because of?) all these friendly initiatives, we tend to be worse off with each passing year.
All these seemingly friendly initiatives, focused on alleviating poverty in Africa are precisely that: alleviating, make poverty bearable, but not to eliminate it. Shift the load to the other shoulder! Multiply processes and conferences, speak of partnerships, but ensure that nothing changes.
Financing For Development is a conference that will take place in Seville, Spain, from 30 June to 03 July 2025. An international conference sponsored by UNCTAD, UNDP, WTO, IMF, World Bank, with the following objectives: To address financing gaps in the global south, and manage private investments flows in an acceptable fashion.[3] This is the next stage after other processes that have taken place and are linked, the most recent being the Pact for the Future[4], adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2024, with the declared intention to ensure
Sustainable development and financing for development,
The subject of this paper.
International peace and security,
We keep noting that those that promote most wars are those that by international convention are most responsible for peace and security in the world, sitting as they are in the UN Security Council, with extraordinary veto powers.
Science, technology an innovation and digital cooperation,
Youth and future generations,
It reminds us of how Europe is afraid of the African youth flooding that continent and the extent to which they are prepared to go and erect barriers at the Sahel belt. The Sahel, deep in Africa, has become the Southern border of Europe, and Europe feels entitled to station troops in foreign African countries.
Transforming global governance,
We all follow how the Security Council operates, how the IMF and World Bank chiefs are selected: IMF being the preserve of Europe, and the World Bank for America.
One can write a whole treatise about the many processes that recycle the ideas of Cancun 1981 on North/South Cooperation on Development[5], while diluting them by crowding out and clouding already existing ideas with new concepts, so as not to solve the core issue they purport to tackle. Suffice it to refer to already existing Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their degree of success since they were launched in 2015 (nine years ago), themselves a successor, a reformulation if you will, of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in 2000. What am I saying: that the Pact for the Future is another illusion, and here I am sorry to refuse to be optimist about my own employer of yesteryears. We should first deal with the reasons for the current state of affairs.
Ineluctably, I fall back into a conclusion that refuses to go away: multiplication of processes, to give the impression of movement. Let me for instance review a few of the SDGs since their adoption in 2015 as they pertain to Mozambique. In so doing, I dispense with existing official reports that I read, with the indicators adopted therein, imposed by the international order. I am instead looking at the ground reality, human indicators, not abstract and extrapolated statistics:
SDG1: End Poverty: Contrary to the goal, the impact, performance and process indicators show that in Mozambique poverty has actually increased and turned into misery, despite the abundance of resources that concomitantly have resulted into megaprojects in the country. Some 62% of the 33 million people are extremely poor. And there are the “not extremely poor”…
SDG 3: Health: While official reports measure health achievements to give a positive impression (U5MR and CMR), these indicators are out of context. The true indicators are
The elites access health services abroad,
Medicines and medical equipment are in short supply,
Many people do not have the money to go to hospital and only go there as a final resort, mostly terminal, to go and die,
Medical practitioners have been on repeated strikes in the last two years, not just for poor salaries, but also for lack of adequate working conditions to be able to save lives.
SDG4: Education: in Mozambique,
Many schoolchildren still study under trees, sit on rugged bricks or on the floor,
Books and manuals carry major editorial errors and wrong information,
Children of the elite study abroad or in exclusive schools.
Professionals teach classes of more than 100 students per classroom in many schools,
Tests and exams do not challenge students intellectually to think and express themselves in writing, because they are all and country-wide based on multiple-choice questions, invariably,
Teachers are forced to show very positive results at the end of the year, at the risk of being dismissed.
SDG 6: Quality water: Cholera is a recurrent epidemic during rainy periods every year and are expected to continue, especially in suburbs of cities and towns.
SDG 8: Decent work: as stated, every year, Mozambique produces 300,000 employable youth every year, of which, less than 5% actually find employment.
SDG16: Peace, Justice: one need only mention three events:
The war in Cabo Delgado and the consequent forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of people,
The recurrent and ongoing targeted abductions of businesspeople in Maputo,
Exclusion from benefits, from financing and from jobs on the basis of political opinion and belonging.
SDG17: Partnership for the Goals: Mozambique is being compelled by the IMF to cut public spending on salaries and limit recruitment in the public sector, just as population growth leads to millions of children entering the school system each year. In 2024, Mozambique already faced a deficit of 16,000 schoolteachers[6]. What will occur in 2025 and beyond if the political and policy approach remains unchanged, with teachers not receiving their overtime payments and the 13th salary?
By being forced to strangle its own money supply, Mozambique is being prevented from improving on education or health (SDGs 3 and 4) by the IMF dictats. The IMF forces the central bank to starve commercial banks; these are in turn unable to offer affordable credits for production, infrastructure rehabilitation or construction and to promote the small industry. These are the SDG partners; these are the sponsors of financing for development.
What am I saying?
I am suggesting that the current international order is just multiplying processes to give the impression of progress, so as to maintain a system that guarantees prosperity for the rich through the perpetuation of poverty in the Global South, in Africa. The SDG partners, the partners in the financing for development are toxic. That is how come:
Mozambique produces green energy but 70% of it goes to South Africa; Access to electricity in Mozambique is at 40%.
Electricity in South Africa is 3 times cheaper than in Mozambique, from where it originates;
The unit of gas in Cabo Delgado gives Mozambique only 14.5% of what it fetches in the European market. Actually the current government (2025) has declared that it is not ready to renegotiate the terms of this trade. Comforting international capital.
Over 300 people were killed in Mozambique post-election demonstrations, to keep this status quo. Who benefits from the status quo, ignoring the fact that this impoverished population has spoken loud and clear?
One can take the example of Mozambique and extrapolate it across many African countries.
We are running in the same spot. First there were the MDGs, then there were the SDGs, now the Pact for the Future. If past global initiatives have remained unfulfilled, what makes us believe that with the same processes, this will?
At the financial level is where we are weakest. First there were the structural adjustment programmes. They killed our industries and strengthened our indebtedness, transforming our countries into huge borderless and open supermarkets (mostly of second-hand products) for countries with industries.
We have gone through several iterations of the same intent: give the impression of progress and ensure we remain exporters of raw materials. No financing of roads and rails linking internal towns to ease and cheapen domestic trade. Instead, financing of rails and roads linking to external markets for export or import. The road Maputo-South Africa is typical of an excellent road for importing foodstuffs from the agro-industrial complex of South Africa (make no mistake, these are not agro-industrial complexes owned by any black in South Africa, by any stretch of the imagination), but the road Maputo-Beira is pitiful, and if any exists to link Maputo to Pemba. Northern areas of the country produce more food but cannot reach the south of the same country! No international finance is ready to put money on that, but they put money on the Tete-Beira and Tete-Nacala railroad, for coal exports.
THE DEBT BALLET: Our captains of national finance management in Maputo (replace “Maputo” with the name of your capital) know and have perfectly adopted the international finance language. Now we are on debt rescheduling; then on debt re-financing, then on debt restructuring, then into debt sustainability frameworks, then debt swap, into medium-term debt management strategy. You will find many designations and get confused. And then there is the fanciful pro-poor programming. Even the choice of words hardly hides the intention: pro-poor: we need them poor. To do what? to do good to them and continue whitewashing the image of the do-gooders.
The strategy was and remains the same: Do not kill the chicken that lays the golden egg, but keep it in that cage, give it the impression that it is poor because of its own choice to remain in the cage. Throw some grains and wait for the golden egg. Do not kill, but keep it perpetually and sufficiently weak to be of exclusive use to us.
And introduce the notion and practice of PPP (Public-Private Partnerships), so that national elites have a taste of the international capital, the better to protect the interests of the said international capital in the territory they control.
What is PPP and who benefits from it in countries like Mozambique? Obviously either those who have access to money or can dispense favours: facilitate registration, tax exemptions, acquisition of productive land, and force the movement of people from areas of production or from land desired by international capital. That is our side of the PPP. That is Cabo Delgado. Do we still wonder there is war there? Does anyone really believe that the war is about terrorism? Ask PPP. As for us, we are not convinced by the narrative, not sure it is about terrorists that came from Kibiti.
III. CONCLUSION
Meanwhile, elsewhere, exclusive self-appointed clubs are also at work and have their own processes, which those of us not at the table come to read from news outlets: the G20, the Davos crowd, they desire to rule the world and now are alarmed at the BRICS.
The objective of the Conference on Financing for Development is: Addressing financing gaps in the Global South and managing private investments in an accountable fashion is. We all know, and if it were needed, we proved with the case of Mozambique, that finance gaps came and continue to come from overwhelming indebtedness and unfavourable extractive exploitation, and unless that is resolved, the conference is a side performance of speeches.
And Managing private investment in an accountable fashion: well, private investment like that of TotalEnergies in Cabo Delgado will not allow anyone to interfere with their money. They are not and will not be accountable to no one. Not even to the government of Mozambique, as it has clearly stated in its report about Cabo Delgado[7]. You can ask Biafra how Elf-Aquitaine (now TotalEnergies) behaved there.
So, reducing poverty is our game of going in circles, without eliminating it. A persistent discourse despite the efforts of the SDGs to use the expression “elimination of poverty”.
Is it worth participating?
Of course. If one is absent, one cannot blame anyone else for not having been able to influence at source, for not attempting to correct a battery of wrong concepts promoted in such fora. Based on wrong concepts, rules are formulated and then an attempt will be made at generalizing and enforcing them. If one is invited, one needs to be at the table and accept or object to the product being sold/promoted.
Poverty will be eliminated at home through a strong social contract between the people and the state, not at multilateral tables. Success requires dealing distinctly with international capital domestically.
No one will save us. We will save ourselves. The alternative is that we resign ourselves to wallowing in collective misery, us and our sons.
As far as my experience goes with international processes,
they are good ground for learning about the international system of interests,
they allow you to push your own narrative and correct other narratives of you,
they are good platforms for identifying the best business partners. And drag them to bilateral win-win dialogue.
May I digress, as usual? It occurs to me to mention another LIE, in closing: measuring national economic growth through GDP is a fallacy that leads us into another distraction: that of comparing countries, instead of focusing on internal self-evaluation, with our home-grown measurement tools, internally conceived performance, impact and process indicators that help us measure how we are developing. In the same areas as identified by the SDGs, but with our own indicators: how the average citizen is faring. Comparing externally distracts from the real problems and talks to an external gallery that is often not even listening.
A luta será dura.
A lua continua.
Canhandula,
January 2025
[6] https://clubofmozambique.com/news/mozambique-education-ministry-short-of-around-16000-new-teachers-261480/
[7] https://totalenergies.com/media/news/press-releases/totalenergies-publishes-jcrufins-report-human-rights-cabo-delgado

Comments