This is the next post in a series titled “Mozambique 101”. This post explains what happens when the government makes a decision nobody likes. This series is my attempt to answer many of the questions that I’ve been asked about Mozambique, other than the ever-popular “where’s THAT?” These articles should help you understand what things are like in Mozambique and just how they came to be that way.
Previously in this series we covered that Mozambique used to communist until about the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet Union collapsed. Around that time, the President of Mozambique announced that he was making an enlightened decision and moving the country in the direction of capitalism and economic freedom. People would have appreciated this, if it had actually offered any change for the masses.
Because the country has such tight restrictions on foreign investment it means that foreigners don’t invest (they kind of do, but if you look at your syllabus you’ll see we don’t cover that until Economics Part 2). What foreign investment there is goes straight to the salaries for the government. About six months ago, France announced that it would be cutting portions of its foreign aid and was eliminating about $150million in aid to Mozambique. The response of Mozambique was to cry foul to the European Union and complain that if France pulled their support it would mean a 10% cut to their federal budget. That’s basically because there’s nothing in Mozambique that generates money except for European aid.
The threatened reduction of foreign aid can often lead to confusing policies. If you follow world commodities you’ll know that grain prices surged in August because Russia accidentally lit all their wheat fields on fire or something. As a result, world grain prices surged and suddenly bread costs more. Well, here in our nice, peaceful (read: walking on eggshells) corner of the world the government sets bread prices because it subsidizes the grain coming into the country. So when they announced there would be a 30% increase in the price of a loaf of bread the people responded with 4 days of riots.
Now, since news out of the country was mostly silent, I’ve managed to piece together that the bread riots were made up of one part European Football Game Riot (people lighting flares, turning over cars, setting garbage on fire) and two parts L.A. Race Riot (looting, tire fires, people hurling rocks at police, and the police firing rubber bullets into the crowd to disperse it). Its was nothing like the Seattle World Trade Organization Riots in 2000 because those weren’t people from Seattle, they were all hippies from Colorado and Canadians.
Back to the story. So, day three into the riots, the (formerly) communist government finds out that people have been organizing the riots using their cell phones. To find out why everybody in one of the ten poorest countries in the world has a cell phone you’ll need wait for the week on Urbanization. So the Government decides to shut down the phone networks in the entire country. They then later demanded that the cell companies (both of them) turn over all text messages in the last week. They then correlated numbers they knew with people who happen to be known members of the opposition party and threw them all in jail.
The problem is now that most cell phone users are anonymous. People buy a phone, a SIM card, and buy credit that you can find on pretty much any street corner. So the government is now demanding that these millions of anonymous users register their SIM card with the government. And this is how you have to register. Everybody in my city of 500k people is going to the only two stores in town that sells phones, paying for a piece of paper that they fill in their name, phone number, and national ID number. They then take that to a photocopy shot and have it photocopied with their national ID card and turn that in to the government. In an odd coincidence the price of a photocopy has tripled since two weeks ago when this started. But I’m sure that can be explained by the government reducing the subsidy for toner and size A4 paper. I think Christina said it best when she said, “For a country that can’t do a single thing right they’re putting bureaucracy in the one place they don’t need it.”
Back to those riots, the government was threatening to raise the price of bread by 30%. In the four days of riots (which took place in only two cities) a confirmed ten people died. This is because, supposedly, the police were using live ammunition to quell the rioters. I’m not saying that in the sense that countless people dies, but they found 10 people dead. And I bet only three of you reading this knew that any of this even happened. Meanwhile, France was in the top of the headlines because people are on strike because they are raising the retirement age by two years. In a country where people can’t afford bread and work till they die at the ripe old age of 45, France’s protest look pretty petty from where I'm sitting.
Next time on Mozambique 101 we’ll be discussing Geography. And for those of you that don’t like Geopgraphy, you probably still won’t so I’ll try to keep it short.
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