The director of the Africa Programme at the British Royal Institute of International Studies believes that this year’s general elections in Mozambique will be marked by allegations of fraud, with the results being contested, the Lusa news agency reported on Saturday, 20 January.
“The national elections in October will increasingly be the priority issue in Mozambique, and by the end of the first quarter we should know who the presidential candidate of the ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) will be,” said Alex Vines, speaking to Lusa about the main topics for Mozambique this year.
“Looking at how controversial the municipal elections were in October last year, the national elections are going to be unpleasant, with allegations of fraud and the results are likely to be fiercely contested,” added the director of Chatham House.
The next presidential, legislative, provincial assembly and provincial governor elections will be held simultaneously on 9 October this year.
Among the main topics to be prioritised by the Mozambican authorities this year, Alex Vines highlighted the situation in the north of the country and the presidency of the United Nations Security Council in May.
“The insurgency in Cabo Delgado will continue, the SAMIM forces will leave and the Rwandan military will expand its theatre of operations, with oil giant TotalEnergies due to restart its gas project, the largest foreign direct investment project in Africa,” said the analyst, noting that some investors and clients have abandoned it.
Alex Vines explains that “Indonesia’s Pertamina has declared force majeure (a legal mechanism for abandoning a project without paying compensation), and in October last year Dutch policymakers said they wanted to be consulted on the human rights situation before approving a €1 billion guarantee on the project, which was suspended in April 2021 following an increase in armed attacks in the Cabo Delgado region.”
At continental level, Alex Vines pointed out that although Africa is the second fastest growing region after Asia, the 4% expansion “shows a less auspicious reality”, highlighting several issues that will be among the governments’ priorities for this year.
“New conflicts, more coups d’état, the renewed conflict between Israel and Gaza and the war between Russia and Ukraine are all contributing to preventing further growth across the continent,” wrote the analyst in an article on the main issues for Africa in 2024, published in the South African newspaper Mail & Guardian.
The debate on African countries’ public debt “will be prominent in 2024; high interest rates and a stronger dollar make it more expensive for African countries to service their debt in dollars, which has led to more over-indebtedness in several countries,” the analyst added, noting that at the beginning of this year there were nine African countries in a situation of over-indebtedness, and a further 15 at high risk and 14 at moderate risk of falling into this situation.
In the article, Alex Vines also pointed to “the worsening political instability on the continent, exemplified by the nine military coups since 2020, increasing the focus on the fragility of the constitutional rule of law” and emphasised that “the countries that are already under military leadership are increasingly unstable, with new coups possible in countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali or Niger”.
For Alex Vines, the high number of elections on the continent (17) has not slowed down investor interest and the willingness of African countries to open up their economies to foreign investment. “There will be a faster pace of trade forums this year,” he emphasised, pointing to the second UK-Africa Investment Forum in May, the Italy-Africa conference in Rome, which chairs the G7, and the Korea-Africa and India-Africa summits in June.
