The Political ~C&Omyof a Dream Undone
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The Political ~c&omyof A Dream Undone Mozambique: A Dream Undone The Political Economy of Democracy, 1975-84 Nordiska afrikainstitutet, Uppsala 1990 This book is published with support from SAREC (Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries) Cover photo: A Gunnartz ISBN 9 1-7 106-262-9 O Bertil Egeri5 and Nordiska afrikainstitutet Printed in Sweden by Motala Grafiska Motala 1990 It is important to avoid two common tendencies: on the one hand, to overestimate the 'socialist' nature of such societies and view 'full' socialism as merely a future extrapolation of current realities; on the other hand, to minimise the difficulties involved in realising socialist goals in current Third World conditions and engage in critiques which are empty because unrealistic. (Gordon White 1983) Contents PREFACE M THE SECOND EDITION ......................................................4 PREFACE ....................................................................................9 1. INTRODUCIION . THE STUDY OF A CONTRADIC~ON......................... 13 2. THE ARMED STRUGGLE: WHERE SOCIALIST IDEOLOGY WAS BORN .......................................................17 The start: Ignorance and hunger......................................... 21 Reforms and advances.................................................... 25 From Front to State Power - conditions and strategies............... 27 3. POPULAR POWER. DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISTTRADITION ....................................................... 35 Popular Power . the issue of division of power....................... 35 Socialist development and democracy.................................. 40 Leadership, the party and the state...................................... 41 Planning, economic development and participation................... 44 4. NO EASY TRANSITION FROM EXTREME COLONISATION...................... 47 The Colony: Underdevelopment between Lisbon and Pretoria...... 47 In anticipation of independence.......................................... 56 Coming to terms in Lusaka............................................... 61 The Dynamising Groups - essential base of the new party-state............................................... 65 5. THE! ADOPTION OF A SOCIAUST PERSPECTIVE............................... 73 6. ECONOMY m STATE DURING TRANS~ON................................. 83 A proposed periodisation of development.............................. 83 Attempting the impossible? Economic recovery and decline......... 86 Two trends of development ideology - the problem of reconciliation............................................. 92 State planning and development ........................................ 98 The Presidential Offensive: Anti-bureaucratic attack with repercussions............................................... 102 The Fourth Party Congress and the State............................. 105 7. ORCAMSNC THE PEOPLE................................................... 109 Introduction: The institutional structure............................... 109 Nursing a vanguard party in the shadow of the state................ 112 The People's Assemblies - first steps towards representative democracy ............................................... 120 Organising the workers - into which role?............................ 130 8. MUEDA IN THE 1980s. POPULAR POWER AND THE PEASANT ................................................. 143 Connecting the present with the past . fieldwork in the 'liberated areas'. ...................................... 143 The setting: Mueda....................................................... 146 Ngapa. outpost on the Tanzanian border .............................150 Nandimba . open credibility crisis..................................... 155 District leadership. authority under strain ............................ 165 9. POPULAR POWER IN CUBA . CONTRASTS AND SIMILARITIES .......................................................... 17 1 Cuba . an illuminating comparison .................................... 171 Important similarities .................................................... 172 Learning from the differences.......................................... 173 10. SOCIALISM N A POOR COUNTRY......................................... 179 Global relations and socialist change in the periphery ...............18 1 The socialist sector - "our natural allies" ..............................183 Socialism and political practice in Mozambique...................... 185 The struggle continues.................................................. 192 NOTES .......................................................................... 195 Appendx CUBA'S ROAD TO POPULAR POWER . A Background Analysis to Chapter 9................................... 213 Cuba, a background ........................................................ 213 From nationalism to socialism ............................................. 215 A decade of foundation and experimentation............................ 217 Institutionalising the revolution. ...........................................222 Cuba in the 1980s ........................................................... 228 Preface to the Second Edition As the decade of the 1980s came to a close, the inherent contradictions of the South African apartheid state had reached a level which had forced a seemingly irresistible move towards its rapid dismantling and replacement with a democratic state. At the other end of the political spectrum, the much younger socialist states in Eastern Europe could no longer control their inherent tensions, and the strength of the opposition in those last days of the decade bore evidence of the fallacy of the kind of democracy that had been allowed to exist under the aegis of the de facto one-party state. Mozambique's post-independence history is intimately linked to these two traumatic experiences. Apartheid South Africa, through its fanatic genocidal pursuance of a policy of destruction of the whole social fabric of Mozambique, horrific at the limits of human imagination, has relegated the Frelimo project of creating a new society, based on solidarity and not exploitation, to the mem- ories in the minds of those for whom the first years of independence was the experience of their life. Eastern Europe has, with all its historical disparity with Mozambique, including the process of its transition to institutionalised socialism, exerted an essential influence on the formation and behaviour of the state that was to guide Mozambique to socialism. The debate about the fate of Mozambique, the "apparent paradox of widespread and extreme misery after ten years of development in the name of Popular Power" as I saw it when this book was written, has too often centered on the relative weight of external efforts to kill the Mozambican Dream, as compared to the internal problems linked to the policies of the Frelimo government, and by implication to those of its advisors. In reality, the two are intimately related to the point of being distin- guishable only in the abstract. The unique character of the Frelimo project as it unfolded in the many years of rural struggle against the colonial power, was carried over into the early period of state- and nation-building. It proved uniquely successful in the mobilisation of collective strength to rescue the country from anarchy and start buildng the nation on the ashes of the old. And the new government needed models, needed advice on how to proceed with the state aspect of the nation. This could not have come from the old colonial power, nor from those European metropoles so successful in maintaining neocolonialist relations of domination other ex-colonies. It came, primarily, from that part of Europe which had no heritage of colonial Bertil Egero domination, and which professed as its aim the creation through socialism of egalitarian societies. The impact of Eastern European guidance would not have been there in such strength had Portugal been able to support a Mozambican nationalism built on access to education and participation among the colonised in Mozambique. It would have been different, had its colonial economy not been so deeply penetrated by South Africa, thereby leaving the new govern- ment with no option but to seek a radical reduction of this dependence in order to give real meaning to the newly won political independence. The errors and fallacies of the Frelimo state would have looked very different in their effects, and most likely in their rectification, had its work not been undermined by a successful strategy of economic, political and military destabilisation by its western enemies, first among them South Africa. A major obscuring factor in the analysis of Mozambique after indepen- dence is that of MNR, or Renarno. Created by Rhodesian security officers in the early 1970s and taken over by SADF at the time of Zimbabwe's independence, it is an entirely external construction with no historical roots in Mozambican society. Its methods of recruitment and its exclusive emphasis on terror and destruction, underline the character of MNR as an instrument in the service of external interests. Only fragmented evidence is available on the build-up of this organ- isation, its internal life and motivations. The extreme methods used against new recruits, described by, among others, Minter (1989) and Roesch (1990), cast grave doubt over any proposal that it may enjoy anything reminiscent of popular support inside the country. However, the swift spread of MNR over Mozambique in the early 1980s has raised