Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  8

  Neighborhood Headquarters

  BEIRA

  A Frelimo é que fez. A Frelimo é que faz.

  It’s Frelimo that did it; it’s Frelimo that does it.

  —PARTY SLOGAN

  The Mapiko Lounge Bar occupies one of the older buildings in the oldest part of Beira, Mozambique’s third-largest city. It’s a stately two-story stucco affair built in the early twentieth century, repainted in lively pink, with elegant ironwork grilles on each second-floor balcony and an imposing wrought-iron gate outside. In the colonial era, it was a small hotel, nationalized after independence when the Portuguese owners left the country. Recent renovations have made the interior unrecognizable. Jazz combos, DJs, and standup comedians perform in an intimate hall with sparkly pink wall-paper and electric-blue cocktails served on faux-leather sofas. On the bar’s Facebook timeline, you can see “before” pictures showing the building’s roofless facade before the conversion got under way.

  The club stands at one end of a street market in Chaimite, a bustling commercial neighborhood between Beira’s downtown and the port, built up a century ago as a railway link to move goods in and out of the vast landlocked territories of the British Empire. Today, sidewalk vendors clog the streets themselves, dangling dozens of USB chargers and impossibly cheap headphones from crude wooden stalls set up on the pavement. Women move through honking motorcycle traffic carrying plastic tubs of pineapples and peanuts over their heads, or sit in the shade of Indian almond trees on a slender triangular plaza across from the Mapiko.

  There, amid the bustle of cold-drink sellers and steaming pots of rice and stew, a trio of faithful municipal clerks sit behind two rusty desks counting change and checking IDs, doing their best to ignore the detritus of bottle caps and discarded scratch cards in the dirt around them. This is a local government office known as the sede de bairro—the “neighborhood headquarters” for Chaimite. The clerks’ main line of business is writing out the declarations of residency needed for all manner of interactions with officialdom: to open bank accounts, to send or receive international wire transfers, to remove the body of someone who has died at home, to obtain a birth certificate when a child is born, to register a marriage, or to request help resolving disputes between neighbors.

  The lead clerk didn’t want his real name to be used; I’ll call him Mr. Vicente. Vicente is a dignified man approaching seventy, with a stern bearing and the cool good looks of an aging movie star. He entered the civil service in the 1960s and still completes his residency declarations—in triplicate, with two sheets of carbon paper—with the flawless looping cursive of another time. “When it rains, we take refuge in a hallway,” he explained bitterly, gesturing toward a covered alley flanking a grocery store around the corner. When the headquarters closes for the day, Vicente brings the chairs and a few other necessities to be stored in space belonging to a soda distributor operating across the street. “And at night, when we’re done working, malandros like to come out here, eat on our desks, urinate on the ground,” Vicente said. He looked outraged.

  It’s customary for a sede de bairro to have a sort of community bulletin board as well, where clerks can post subpoenas to appear in court, marriage notices, and the like, to inform interested parties or give people an opportunity to object. Vicente gestured toward the MCel kiosk directly behind his desk, made from a slice of a repurposed shipping container. A faded flag of the city of Beira hung at eye level. “Where can we post any notices?” he asked.

  Until a few years ago, the sede de bairro in Chaimite had a community bulletin board and much more: four walls, a bathroom, even benches where citizens could wait to be seen. For decades, the neighborhood headquarters occupied part of the Posto Administrativo de Chiveve, the next rung up the ladder of government offices, housed in the colonial building now enjoying a third act as the Mapiko Lounge Bar. But that was when Frelimo was in power.

  In 2003, a charismatic thirty-nine-year-old organizer from the opposition, Daviz Simango, ran for mayor on the Renamo ticket—Simango was actually part of a smaller party aligned with Renamo at the time—and won. Suddenly, the ownership of government buildings around Beira became a matter of hot debate.

  Renamo’s electoral victory in Beira was the product of weeks of retail political organizing of a kind that the party had scarcely done before. Leading up to the election, one newspaper noted that hundreds of young people went door-to-door soliciting votes for Daviz Simango “tirelessly, night and day,” while the bars and clubs were populated with men in Frelimo T-shirts.1 But the election was marred by irregularities and allegations of corruption. Initial results from ten polling stations went missing. Vote counting was interrupted repeatedly as officials from each party refused to open warehouses where ballots were stored. A Frelimo technician was caught scribbling extra digits—for example, 142 instead of 42 votes—on the tally sheets being sent to Maputo. It took more than a week to reach a result.2

  Municipal elections are a recent development in Mozambique: local officials were all appointed until 1998. That year, Renamo led a group of opposition parties in a boycott of the country’s first local elections, voicing complaints about fraudulent voter registrations and partisan bias in the state’s election agencies that have become a regular chorus in every election since. Frelimo candidates ran unopposed in 80 percent of city council races and more than half the country’s mayoral elections, winning that post in all thirty-three cities where elections were held.3

  As Simango’s government prepared to take power at the end of 2003, incoming civil servants discovered that the outgoing Frelimo administration had simply locked the doors on many of Beira’s municipal buildings. In Chiveve, James Domingos, the bartender at a restaurant next door, said Frelimo’s chefe do posto and his family went on living on the posto administrativo’s second floor even as the incoming Renamo chefe do posto resorted to signing official documents and conducting the duties of his office on the staircase outside. While the building had functioned as part of the city government for years, this was the first time in Mozambican history that an opposition party actually controlled the machinery of government in any part of the national territory. Beira’s civil service had crossed into the territory of a multiparty democracy, but the buildings it relied on were still stranded in a one-party state.

  The details of this period—the start of a long-running political dispute—have long since slid into the depths of partisan memory, blurring and shifting like underwater objects seen from the surface in bright sunlight. Here, as best as I can tell, is more or less how things went. Downtown, Daviz Simango moved into the spacious wood-paneled mayor’s office in city hall without incident. But in Chiveve, meanwhile, just a few blocks away, the work of the posto administrativo carried on in the stairwell. The chefe do posto and his staff, a former Renamo soldier who lived in the neighborhood told me with indignation, “took off their administration hats, and put on whose hats instead? Frelimo’s! They didn’t want to cede their places!”

  Soon, Frelimo began to use the building to plan a celebration of Josina Machel, Mozambique’s first first lady. The Organização da Mulher Moçambicana (OMM) and Organização da Juventude Moçambicana (OJM), Frelimo’s women and youth organizing bodies, respectively, both held meetings there. Renamo supporters attempted to take the place by force. “We were tired of being attended to in the street,” the soldier said. Partisans of either side gathered in the street—Renamo protesters huddled in front of a pharmacy, Frelimo supporters outside a funeral home by the market where Vicente and his staff now shelter in the rain. For two weeks, they beat drums and exchanged taunts with the other party. Finally, the standoff was resolved. Or, rather, it shifted to the courts: Frelimo would sue to regain control of the building, along with Beira’s sixteen other sedes de bairros, and allow the municipal government to use them in the meantime.

  So it went for seven years. Simango, a civil engineer who worked as a construction manager, had run on a platform of transpare
ncy and efficient management, pledging to combat corruption and fix the sanitation problems that dogged Beira during major cholera outbreaks two years in a row. The odds were long: when he took office, Simango inherited a city of five hundred thousand residents with only three garbage trucks and a government that did all its accounting with paper and pencil. Key staff in the outgoing Frelimo administration had resigned and taken the contents of their filing cabinets with them, leaving Simango’s team in the dark about the nuts and bolts of city administration. Beira’s sixteen hundred civil servants complained that they hadn’t been paid regularly for a full year and promptly went on strike.4 The central government, which funded more than half the operating budgets of all Mozambique’s municipalities, didn’t send money to Beira for a full six months after Simango took office.

  There were similar patterns of obstruction in all five municipalities newly governed by the opposition. In Nampula, political scientists working on a report for USAID catalogued the sheer creativity of Frelimo’s efforts to stymie the success of Renamo mayors, dubbing the approach “neopatrimonialism.” As in Beira, municipal records were carted off to local Frelimo offices or the homes of party leaders, while Maputo withheld disbursements meant to fund salaries, erosion control, and road construction. Renamo-run towns had their boundaries changed abruptly, reducing the number of voters and taxpayers inside city limits.

  The Mapiko Lounge Bar, in Beira, was a municipal office until Daviz Simango won the mayoral election as a candidate for the opposition party Renamo.

  A law stipulating a role for central government in municipal offices was selectively enforced in towns run by Renamo, as mayors were stripped of the power to levy taxes on market vendors or control public water fountains, and saw annual inspections by central government officials accelerate to three or four rounds a year. Civil servants working for the city of Ilha de Moçambique had their positions transferred to local offices of the provincial government. Nearly completed water-supply projects ground to a halt, only to become operational five years later—on the day Frelimo’s candidate was announced as the winner of the mayoral race. Publicly funded community radio stations were shuttered on the grounds that they were functioning as “propaganda” for Renamo. In Angoche, a sleepy seaside town that was an important slave port under the Portuguese, the government withheld stipends for 120 unemployed elderly residents who volunteered in street-cleaning programs, with the argument that volunteering proved their ability to do real work. Renamo mayors responded in kind, expelling workers they saw as too loyal to Frelimo, only to have them reinstated by their provincial counterparts.

  Seeing that endless turf wars with Frelimo were unlikely to produce results Beira’s voters might reward with a second term, Simango took a more pragmatic approach. He won over career civil servants by making it a priority to pay them what they were owed, quickly ending the strike that threatened to paralyze the city government, and retained longtime administrators who were willing to stay and share their knowledge.

  Faced as he was with an uncooperative central government, Simango’s first task was to bolster the city’s financial base so that he had some hope of turning the wheels of government without an influx of cash from Maputo. There were attempts to limit graft and self-dealing—“Nobody is allowed to send the cars or the trucks to the garage without [my] permission, nobody is allowed to go to any kind of shop or market to get an invoice without any permission,” Simango told his staff as he explained a decision to funnel all municipal revenue through a single bank account—and to generate income where there had been none.5 He cracked down on tax evasion at the port and introduced new taxes on fuel and on buildings, posting a ledger of the city’s receipts and expenses in the lobby of city hall. Simango’s deputies introduced competitive bidding for city contracts and required tax collectors to issue a stamped receipt for every payment. Simango appealed directly to foreign donors and nonprofits for project funding and leveraged it on high-visibility measures like improving trash collection and unclogging the drainage canals that flooded the city when it rained.

  Beira is sometimes called the “cathedral of the opposition.”6 Historically, much of the city’s power, like that of Lourenço Marques or Maputo, derived from links to colonial regimes in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. Before independence, some three-quarters of Zimbabwe’s imports and exports passed through Beira and Maputo.7 When, in the late 1970s, Frelimo blocked rail traffic from the apartheid government in Harare, Rhodesian goods had to travel nearly three times as far to port, to Durban, South Africa.

  The political scientist Sergio Chichava has called Sofala Province a “thorn in the side” of Frelimo.8 It was Sofala, along with neighboring Manica, where Afonso Dhlakama and many other key figures in Renamo were born, and where some of the strongest resentment to Frelimo’s early policies of nationalization and collective farming crystallized.

  One of the most powerful figures in late colonial Beira was Jorge Jardim, a Portuguese businessman and the publisher of the daily Notícias da Beira. Jardim, the godson of Portugal’s longtime dictator, António Salazar, had already had a long career as a covert agent and a diplomat in Portugal’s colonies.9 During the war for independence in Mozambique, it was Jardim who spurred the formation of undercover units that staged brutal covert attacks against Frelimo soldiers and civilian supporters.10 Two members of Jardim’s so-called Special Groups would go on to play key roles in the founding of Renamo.11

  As the war wore on and the Portuguese military strategy seemed less and less likely to prevail, writes Paul Fauvet, a British journalist who went on to edit Mozambique’s state news service, Jardim and others began to seek out an alternative path to victory: “If FRELIMO could not be beaten on the battlefield, perhaps it could be cut down in the political arena. It had to be ‘proved’ that FRELIMO did not represent the majority of Mozambicans. That implied that, in a great hurry, alternative political organisations had to be created, and that a referendum should be held on the future of the country. This latter idea . . . never really got off the ground. But the first part of the plan worked. Mozambique was suddenly full of political parties.”12

  Several of these Portuguese-sponsored parties coalesced into a coalition led by Uria Simango, Daviz’s father. Simango was a Protestant minister from Beira who had been a leader of Frelimo’s early incursions against the Portuguese in the center of the country.13 In 1970, when Daviz was six, his father was expelled from Frelimo during a power struggle following the death of Eduardo Mondlane, an early leader of Mozambique’s independence movement.

  Simango fled to Malawi and returned to Mozambique in 1974 to form the Partido da Coligação Nacional, or PCN, with a group of Frelimo dissidents and ties to Beira’s Portuguese elites. Less than a year later, it would be outlawed in an independence treaty that made Frelimo Mozambique’s sole political party.14

  Both Daviz’s parents would live out their last days in a reeducation camp in M’telela, in Mozambique’s far north. When he was captured, Uria Simango was made to read a twenty-page confession of crimes against the country before an audience of hundreds of Frelimo fighters, journalists, and foreign dignitaries.15 Later, Simango is said to have recited psalms while he was tortured. Uria Simango and his wife, Celina, were executed months apart in 1979 and 1980.

  Daviz Simango and his siblings grew up with relatives in Beira. They wouldn’t learn of their parents’ executions until months, or perhaps years, after the fact. Lutero, Daviz’s eldest brother, recalled writing a letter to the governor of Sofala as a boy in 1981, asking permission for himself and his two brothers to go visit their parents.16

  When Lutero formed his own political party in Beira more than a decade later, he used the same acronym his father had—PCN—for Partido de Convenção Nacional.

  Simango is now in his third term as Beira’s mayor. His reputation for clean government has frayed, even among some of those who backed him enthusiastically in his first run. Critics will gladly take you on a tour of plum be
achfront parcels developed by the mayor’s friends and rattle off the places where Simango now owns large houses (South Africa, Maputo, Lisbon). Simango got his start in the party Lutero founded, PCN, or National Convention Party, ultimately joining a coalition with Renamo that produced his first run for mayor. In Beira, two of his cousins have become city councilmen, a brother-in-law served as his legal adviser, while another brother-in-law became his director of water and sanitation in 2015.17 One cousin and city councilman, Obedias Simango, wound up in court in 2011 when it was revealed that he’d diverted loans made by the city into a personal account.18 The money had been earmarked for ten local merchants to build warehouses so they could relocate in a less congested market than the one where they originally operated. At trial, a city employee testified that Obedias Simango had pressed the merchants to make favorable statements to the judge. Obedias said he’d merely deposited the money in his account so that he could supervise the payments and repayments by the merchants.

  Patronage is standard practice in Mozambican politics. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the IMF and the World Bank enforced the transition from Marxism to capitalism, the largest stateowned companies were sold to international investors, while hundreds of smaller firms passed into the hands of people connected to Frelimo party leadership.19 Anxious to claim the wave of privatizations as a free market success, the World Bank and donor countries pushed loans to businesses owned by local elites, even when they knew there was little chance they’d be repaid.20 Leading figures in Frelimo maneuvered to the center of the country’s new capitalist economy. Armando Guebuza, who served as minister of transportation and communications from 1987 to 1994, grew a business empire out of the industries he’d overseen in government: logistics and port management, vehicles and vehicle inspections, public construction. Guebuza’s partners, in turn, have included past ministers of the interior, of fisheries, and of tourism.21 In the words of journalist Marcelo Mosse, musing on the vast web of connections traced through Guebuza’s business network, “It seems as if everyone in the establishment is eventually linked to everyone else.”22