Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano, who is retiring at the end of the year, says he is leaving the country in safe hands, praising his chosen successor Armando Guebuza as a leader who will build on his legacy.
”We have taken all the precautions and studied the succession issue carefully,” Chissano was quoted as saying in a business magazine issued this month.
Chissano said Guebuza was chosen by members of his Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) as a successor who is going to ”keep the pace or accelerate it from where I am going to leave”.
”Like me, he likes dialogue. All these dialogues with the business community, civil society and indeed with the people in our country. He is very much keen to work along that line,” said Chissano in the interview carried in the magazaine Transkalahari/Maputo Corridor.
Mozambique, home to about 17-million people, is one of southern Africa’s poorer nations but its economy has picked up since the end of a 16-year civil war in 1992.
Guebuza (60) is a veteran Frelimo party member who established his credentials in the aftermath of Mozambique’s 1975 independence from Portugal by leading a campaign nicknamed 24/20 in which he gave Portuguese settlers 24 hours to leave Mozambique with only 20kg of baggage.
He was designated as Frelimo’s presidential candidate in June 2002 for elections expected to be held in December this year.
Guebuza, who is also Frelimo’s secretary general, is to face off in the presidential election against Raul Domingos, leader of the Party for Peace Democracy and Development (PDD), and Afonso Dhlakama, leader of the former rebel Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance) movement.
Domingos was number two in Renamo but was expelled by Dhlakama for allegedly holding secret talks with the ruling Frelimo party at the height of a political crisis following Renamo’s rejection of the 1999 general election results.
Chissano took over in war-torn Mozambique after the death of first president Samora Machel in a plane crash in late 1986 and launched peace talks with Renamo rebels in 1990.
He scrapped Mozambique’s socialist-oriented economy and launched free-market reforms backed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
After some 17 years in power, Chissano boasts some successes on the economic and social fronts, with a 10% annual growth rate and a reduction in the level of poverty, although more than half of Mozambique’s people live below the poverty line.
Chissano brought Guebuza back into the government as transport and communications minister in 1986 after he had spent two years in the political wilderness following a spat with Machel.
Some analysts saying that Guebuza’s unpopular past may work against him in the presidential election, while others say he is perceived as a strong leader.
Guebuza stirred controversy with an unpopular programme in 1983 that saw jobless people and prostitutes forcibly relocated from the main cities of Maputo and Beira.
Known as Operation Production, the unemployed and prostitutes were rounded up in the cities and moved to the sparsely populated province of Niassa in the north.
Many reportedly died in the bush, probably devoured by lions and other predators abundant in the area.
In the interview, Chissano conceded that mistakes were made in the early years of Frelimo rule.
”We worked side by side since then and if we have committed mistakes, we all known what they were and how we went about changing for the better,” he said. – Sapa-AFP