Guebuza, who became president in 2004, spread the largesse among family members too, much as his predecessor Joaquim Chissano had done. One of Guebuza’s daughters, Valentina, was one of the richest women in Mozambique by the time she died at thirty-six, thanks largely to her father’s position.23 Afonso Dhlakama, too, has rewarded people close to him—his niece, Ivone Soares, for instance, has risen quickly to lead Renamo’s delegation in parliament. Alas, Renamo has never had quite the same opportunities for patronage as the party in power. A dominant theory of Dhlakama’s return to war in recent years, in fact, has been that violence is a negotiating tactic to get a big enough payoff that he can better reward those around him. Political scientists have argued that Simango’s footprint in Beira presents a new pattern in Mozambican politics. If Frelimo puts the interests of the party first, and Dhlakama’s main test is loyalty to himself, in Simango’s movement, family ties rule.24
Simango has emerged as an exceptionally popular figure in Beira, with a reputation abroad as Mozambique’s best mayor and a string of awards from a South African business magazine to match.25 Yet at the end of Simango’s first term, as he prepared to run for reelection in 2008, party leader Afonso Dhlakama passed him over for the mayoral ticket, claiming that Renamo’s base didn’t view him as a real member of the party.26 Many observers saw a leader too insecure to allow a protégé to become popular in his own right. Simango “was just a good manager, but not a good politician,” Dhlakama said later, a “kid” incapable of succeeding him as the leader of the party. Besides, Dhlakama himself had made Simango important by giving him a shot at mayor in the first place.27 In a strange way, Dhlakama’s paranoia was vindicated by the kid’s response. Simango subsequently ran as an independent, and, after Dhlakama expelled him from Renamo for “breaking party rules,” went on to win with 60 percent of the vote—a wider margin than his first victory.28
The following year, Simango formed his own political party, Movimento Democrático de Moçambique, known as MDM, and ran for president, winning 8 percent of the vote.29 Almost immediately after MDM was created, it attracted, in the words of a man I spoke to in Maputo, “the thinkers of Renamo,” including Daviz’s brother Lutero and Maria Moreno, the head of Renamo’s delegation in parliament.30 After more than a decade with only one viable opposition party in Mozambique, the “thinkers of Renamo” could finally choose their party affiliation on other grounds, and many chose to leave.
At times, MDM has seemed to surpass Renamo as the most credible threat to Frelimo’s one-party rule. Simango hasn’t improved on his first showing in national elections, but his party has ridden a wave of support from young urban voters to win mayoral races in Quelimane and Nampula. Today, three of MDM’s seventeen deputies in parliament represent Maputo, where Renamo has never won a seat.31
In Simango’s first term, he led a Renamo city council majority against Frelimo’s very first experience of being an opposition party. The second time around, he was an independent candidate without a caucus: “It was Frelimo, Renamo, and GDB all against the mayor,” he told me when I visited his office in 2016, referring to another small opposition party. Simango is now in his third term, and his own party, MDM, controls a majority of the seats on Beira’s city council.
“If you get thrown into the water, you better know how to swim,” he said, hunching over wearily in a navy blazer. It was eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, but Simango yawned repeatedly and said he hadn’t slept. The day before, I’d read in the paper about a spat between the mayor’s office and the district government over the renovation of a pair of elementary school classrooms in one of Beira’s poor, outlying neighborhoods, on the road to the airport.32 Simango had visited the school for a ribbon cutting a few days earlier, but neither the school principal nor any representative from the district education office—under Frelimo control—was there to take part.33 “District government accuses city of usurping power,” the headline read, “after Simango inaugurates infrastructure that doesn’t belong to the city.”
Decentralization of public services has been a halting, gradual undertaking in Beira. Agreements to transfer the machinery of health, electricity, and transportation to the city have been marked by similar disputes. Public education remains under the purview of the central government. The schools are managed through a district office that reports to Maputo. In this instance, both the district government and the city of Beira claimed to have funded the construction. No one disputed that additional classrooms were an unequivocal good; the argument was about who should be allowed to take credit.
Simango is a big, affable man with a gentle way of speaking and a penchant for talking about himself in the third person. He laughed out loud when I asked him if there had been other examples of this kind of friction over the optics of providing public goods. Once, he said, he’d visited a school for a desk giveaway, only to see the principal fired the next day. “We’ve given schools desks and had the students shut in the classrooms so that they wouldn’t be shown with Daviz Simango giving away desks.” When top brass from city hall delivered ambulances paid for by the European Union to the hospital, they found no staff downstairs to accept them.34 Then, looking up, Simango said, he’d seen nurses watching from windows on the hospital’s upper floors. “So we left the ambulances with the neighborhood secretary,” Simango said. “As soon as I left, you heard an ambulance leaving the hospital, sirens on, going to get a patient.”
“There are lots of episodes,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Lots.”
For twelve years, Frelimo—and later Renamo—had voted repeatedly against the municipal budgets he sent up, forging a compromise only when the law allowed for dissolution of the city council if a budget failed to pass. Then, in his third term, things shifted. “They knew that if the city council was dissolved, Daviz Simango would be up for election again, and he’d win a majority on the council. So they would all be out of work. So . . . at least once a year, they knew they had to approve the municipal budget.” He laughed. He said 2016 was the first time his annual budget was approved on the first vote.
One afternoon, I dropped by the offices of Beira’s daily newspaper, Diário de Moçambique, to chat with the editor, Francisco Muiange, and flip through the paper’s archives. Muiange was nonplussed by MDM’s basic argument over the sedes de bairros—namely, that there was something wrong, prima facie, when property belonging to the government passed into private hands. Simango’s election presented a novel case, but fundamentally, Muiange viewed the whole problem as another messy piece of Mozambique’s transition from Marxism to multiparty democracy. “Lots of things are that way,” he said. “The Frelimo headquarters in Maputo, wherever Frelimo meets elsewhere—they’re all buildings that once belonged to the state. But in that period between 1974 and 1975”—when Mozambique became independent—“there was no documentation whatsoever.
“So Frelimo used the government’s real estate as though it was always going to be a one-party state. And when there started to be multiple parties, they tried to register the buildings that had been used for public administration to show that they belonged to the party. As long as Frelimo ran the government, it stayed peaceful. It wasn’t a problem for them to use the party’s buildings for public administration. But as soon as someone else won the elections . . .”
Muiange shrugged. Even Frelimo had fallen prey to similar schemes. He told the story of a former provincial governor in Beira who discovered while in office that his official residence didn’t have a plaque that said “Patrimonio do Estado” or a legal title saying the building belonged to the government. He registered the house in his own name, Muiange said, and when he left office, he kept it. Frelimo protested but, ultimately, the party lost out.
“There are lots of things that supposedly belong to the state that from a legal point of view don’t,” Muiange said coolly. “So Frelimo just says, ‘Where’s your documentation?’”
As the standoff over Beira’s municipal buildings wore on, the ca
se’s long, contested timeline unspooled before a national audience. In the 1970s, the buildings that became Beira’s sedes de bairros hosted Frelimo’s local party cells, grupos dinamizadores, or “dynamizing groups.”35 By 1998, when Mozambique had transitioned to multiparty elections and passed a series of laws to strengthen municipal government, the sedes de bairros were being used to administer basic public services—leased, Frelimo would contend later, from the party by the Frelimo-run city government.36 But it’s unclear whether the buildings belonged to the party or to the state.
After independence, Frelimo’s ascendant Marxist government nationalized Mozambican-owned rental properties alongside tens of thousands of houses and buildings that belonged to Portuguese settlers and the colonial state.37 It later defined a process for divestiture to allow people to purchase the properties from the government at an affordable price. This is the process Frelimo claimed to have used to appropriate the sedes in Beira, except the dates didn’t seem to line up. Records used in the court case point to four or five separate occasions on which the buildings were said to have passed from the state to the party.
The editorial page of Mozambique’s leading independent paper, Savana, pointed out that Frelimo could not have legally leased the buildings to the city government in 1998, because the party itself was a tenant of the national government—it hadn’t yet gone through the divestiture process.38 What, then, of the back rent the court said the city of Beira owed to Frelimo? asked José Cruz, a leading MDM representative on the city council. “Let’s say Frelimo was in fact a tenant of the Administração do Parque Imobiliário do Estado”—APIE, the agency that oversees government real estate holdings. “What is wrong is that [Frelimo] now wants to sublease these buildings to the [city], the entity that represents the state,” Cruz said.
“Why should we have to rent state houses from a private entity, when we are the state?”39
Frelimo argued it had registered the buildings in the party’s name in January 2003, well before Simango’s election.40 But Frelimo also made a request to the governor of Sofala to transfer the buildings to the party in June. The court ruled that the buildings passed into Frelimo ownership six weeks after that, on July 29. It wasn’t until nearly a year and a half later that APIE published a notice in the Diário advising Beira of Frelimo’s request for the transfer and giving citizens thirty days to object.
The city of Beira, meanwhile, produced documents showing that the sedes had been listed as municipal property at the time of the handover from Simango’s predecessor—a Frelimo mayor—in 2004. Moreover, Simango argued, real estate records in the dispute listed addresses that didn’t match the buildings Frelimo claimed. “[That’s] an element that the court should consider,” he said. In two cases, the buildings in question hadn’t yet been built on the date Frelimo claimed its ownership began. They were constructed later, using municipal funds. In that case, observers asked, shouldn’t the real question be how much else has Frelimo taken from the state?
A third layer of the dispute focused on judicial process: during the standoff, the parties couldn’t agree which court had jurisdiction over the case. In December 2006, Sofala’s provincial court ordered the city of Beira to cede the disputed buildings to Frelimo and pay the party a $30,000 penalty for lost rent.41 Simango refused and swiftly appealed to the supreme court.42 For three years, the case was in purgatory, while the city government continued to occupy the sedes. It finally landed in the high court in July of 2010. Two days later, the provincial court moved to execute its 2006 order and seize the buildings, five at a time, igniting the protests that brought the process, once again, to a standstill. “How strange,” Simango told an independent weekly. “It was only . . . days ago that our case got to the Supreme Court.”
The judge in the provincial court acknowledged that his order was provisory—should his ruling be struck down, the buildings would revert to the city of Beira—but the protesters would have none of it, continuing to cook over open fires in the street beside each sede, even as the police gathered around them in force. “We won’t leave here,” they sang, “come and kill us then.”43
At the end of a week, the court had failed to hand Frelimo a single building.44 The judge yielded to popular pressure, calling a meeting with Simango and Gilberto Correia, Frelimo’s legal representative. At Simango’s request, the court decided to commission an expert report on the property records in the case. Then, in a strange turn, suddenly it was Simango who wanted to let the provincial court handle the matter, while Correia accused the judge of “meddling with the case” when it was already in the hands of the supreme court.45
The mood remained tense for weeks. Then president Armando Guebuza met with Simango in Maputo, “to avoid bloodshed,” as one paper put it.46 By the end of July, even Renamo officials had joined cause with Frelimo in calling on Simango to give up and accusing him of using his supporters as pawns.47 Manuel Joaquim, one of Simango’s deputies, countered that Beirenses would protect the sedes until there was a “final verdict that we feel is just.”48
Eventually, Dom Jaime Gonçalves, the archbishop of Beira, stepped gingerly into the fray. The archbishop, who spent years as the lead mediator in negotiations that brought an end to Mozambique’s civil war in 1992, scrupulously avoided taking sides and simply encouraged the city to move on. The sedes were built more than sixteen years ago, he reasoned. “The city’s needs have outgrown the buildings in question. The time has come to work together and build anew.” Dom Jaime was worried about “a situation where every one moves the coals to cook his own fish.” That, he said, “isn’t good for anybody.”49
On November 16, 2010, the building that would become the Mapiko appeared on page two of the Diário de Moçambique along-side a forlorn-looking close-up of Daviz Simango before a microphone.50 Without completing the property records report it had agreed to in July, the provincial court had abruptly issued a second order requiring the city of Beira to hand over the buildings later that week. Simango’s appeal was still pending before the supreme court, he protested. Yet twenty-four hours later, the transfers began in peace.51 The handoff was completed by the end of the week; Simango said, grudgingly, that he’d accepted the idea of handing over the sedes to avoid getting people killed. At a rally in the MDM stronghold of Munhava, the mayor tried to glean some sense of victory and partisan pride from the setback. “The People see that Frelimo took over public buildings. We’re not going to run after them because we know there will come a day when they’ll be judged for it. . . . Don’t be ashamed of what’s happening today,” he urged Beirenses. “We’re going to get new sedes built with our own hands.”52
“Our challenge here in Beira is forever, even if we have to work beneath a cashew tree,” he said.53
After meeting with Simango, in February 2016, I took a tour of Beira’s Chiveve district, made up of eight neighborhoods that form the core of Beira’s old “cement” city. The district’s current chefe do posto, Manuel dos Santos Mussanema, was at the helm of a battered white pickup. Across the city, thirteen new sedes de bairros had been built to replace all but one of the fourteen lost in the court case. In Munhava, the city had built a new sede de bairro next door to the old one Frelimo won back in court, which now languished, unused, missing windows and doors. Chaimite’s openair sede, across the street from the Mapiko, was the only one left unbuilt—it was not under Simango’s proverbial cashew tree, but shaded by a row of Indian almonds.
“We used to work in that building, and then it was turned into a discotheque,” Mussanema said. He explained that he’d gotten to know the mayor a few years earlier, while he was trying to complete a philosophy degree at Beira’s Universidade Pedagógica.54 The department required him to submit five bound copies of his thesis, and he needed $100 to pay his last fees. “Out of desperation,” he said, he got hold of Daviz Simango’s number and sent him a pleading text message, hoping he would be able to give him a loan. Asked how a twenty-one-year-old stranger got the may- or’s personal
number, Mussanema said, “He’s a very simple [mayor]: he gives his number to anyone.”
In Bairro Quinto, we stopped at the newly constructed Posto Administrativo de Chiveve, formerly housed in the Mapiko. It was a simple cement bungalow where a group of cops waited in the shade of the courtyard next to a row of impounded tchopelas—three-wheeled covered mototaxis. Two benches stood against the wall of the front porch. Above them, it was easy to see the simple things Vicente missed at the sede de bairro in Chaimite: inside one window, a tidy row of lost ID cards was displayed so they would be visible from outside. On the wall, there were lists of eighteen-year-olds summoned to register for the draft, and marriage announcements and “household” notices that allow people to apply for employment benefits for their family members.
The furnishings inside were minimal, and dilapidated, yet they were enough to confer a basic dignity on the notion of administering public services. There were locking doors, a large wooden counter, and behind it, two employees sitting at desks absentmindedly watching a cooking show on TVM. There was a bathroom, a kitchen, and ancient, creaking filing cabinets.
Mussanema said that Beira’s civil servants did include some Frelimo party members, despite oft-repeated critiques that the mayor was just as partisan as Frelimo.55 “The [mayor] doesn’t care that much. He doesn’t like to, what? Get things mixed up. He wants to show how real democracy works. Political cohabitation,” he said.
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