Dividing line

Today I woke to sad news after the death from Covid of a project collaborator here in Maputo. He was involved in all sorts of things in the business and conservation worlds, and news of his loss rippled through his wide network.

This likely caused the low mood I experienced through the day. At lunchtime I met up with Moshin, formerly with a partner organisation here but in the time I was away in visa limbo he has spent a year in Barcelona gaining a masters degree.

We had a can of juice on a bench in Tunduru Gardens. Nearby an old bandstand was acting as a vaccination station and as people walked away rolling their sleeves back down the healthcare workers would yell at them to ensure they lingered for the obligatory 15 minutes, lest they get onto busy streets and pass out.

Moshin and discussed the latest on the hidden debts trial, which he’s glued to. Corruption is a tricky subject to debate. I believe corrupt powerful leaders the world over get so a) removed from the reality of how most people operate and b) convinced that they are transforming lives (even if they’re being ineffectual) that they excuse themselves the huge liberties they take, as somehow being deserved.

Moshin and I then got onto the topic of trickle down economics. Most of the world appears to believe in this system and then be trapped into slaving for it, eliminating any time or energy they could be spending on fighting for something fairer. Remodelling this system is perhaps the greatest challenge of our time, alongside the climate crisis.

In Mozambique, governance and systems are based on colonial law, which was itself based on the operations of influential Portuguese companies, much like the British East India Company. In terms of structuring things fairly, leaders of these profit-making companies, which were focused on exploiting resources, had a major conflict of interest from the year dot. Justice and rights for workers were hardly buzzwords, and I’m not really sure whether the voice of workers is much stronger today when up against powerful corporate interests. Moshin thinks at independence in 1975 the colonial law book should have been ripped up and rewritten to be fairer and more appropriate to the newly independent context. That would have been radical but brilliantly refreshing.

The benches in Tunduru, not all of which are broken like this one, have been painted through with a red line, to promote distancing.