Mozambique's Stalled Revolution

...Of the whites who remain, some are still enthusiastic participants in the revolution—particularly those who were mechanics and clerks a year ago and are now teachers of politics, administration, hygiene, Mozambican history, and even revolutionary music...

...Last December, 400 troops rebelled in Maputo after Machel launched a campaign to root out corruption in the military...

...Roger Mann, a new contributor to these pages, has spent the last three years reporting from Africa...

...A senior official from the Ministry of Finance told me there are only about a dozen trained people in his whole ministry...

...The most devastating blow to the economy came on March 3, when Mozambique closed its Rhodesian border to comply with United Nations sanctions against the rebel colony...

...It will accept only grants, viewing loans as another burden on the economy...

...The fighting destroyed medical facilities, exhausted food reserves and disrupted transportation and communication networks...

...Frelimo's dilemma, indeed, is how to minimize Pretoria's influence while maintaining essential trade...

...What is more, Pretoria employs over 100,000 Mozambicans in its mines...

...The move will deprive the country of about $50 million a year in rail and harbor revenues (Beira and Maputo handled about half of Rhodesia's foreign trade) and $30 million in remittances from Mozambicans working in Rhodesia...

...Although cash crops will be cultivated collectively, each family will raise its own food on a private plot...

...Other, less satisfied, whites have attempted to smuggle their wealth out of the country or have resorted to dealing on the black market...

...Every village will have a consumer cooperative, cottage industries, a school, a daycare center, a dispensary, and a community center for social, cultural and political activities...

...Since Mozambique has one of the lowest literacy rates in Africa, the country has been mobilized into a vast educational complex, and almost anyone who can read is being used to teach...

...Just as in colonial days, too, Mozambicans are required to carry identity cards and must receive special permission to travel outside their home districts...

...FROM COLONY TO POLICE STATE Mozambique's Stalled Revolution BY ROGER MANN Maputo Mozambicans celebrated their first year of independence from Portugal last June 25 hoping the second year would be a happier and more prosperous one...

...In May the government unveiled plans for rural reconstruction aimed at making agriculture the nation's economic base...

...Technicians from Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands are scheduled to begin arriving in Maputo later this year to contribute their skills to solving Mozambique's problems: however, it appears that only those committed to Frelimo's Marxist line will be used...

...The 15,000-man Army, theoretically responsible for insuring the central authority's control over the vast People's Republic of Mozambique (bigger than France and West Germany combined), has itself proved difficult to keep in line...

...A Swedish diplomat who has visited Maputo four times since independence said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs consists of seven or eight competent, overworked officials...

...But one high official, asked about the people's hope for dramatic advancement this year, thought a decade would be more realistic...

...Under the program, communal villages of 250 families are being formed...

...In late May President Machel led a ministerial delegation to Moscow (the third visit to the USSR this year by Mozambican ministers) to arrange for closer ties...

...Despite its preoccupation with external and internal security threats, the Frelimo government has also been trying to rebuild an economy shattered by the war for independence and the subsequent Portuguese exodus...

...Mozambique's most unlikely business partner is South Africa, who buys about 75 per cent of the power generated by the giant Cobora Bassa Dam and reportedly has offered soft loans...

...Answerable exclusively to him, it has arrested many without apparent cause, producing a mood of fear and mistrust in this capital city...

...For these laborers' services, South Africa pays about $10 million a month in gold, a vital source of foreign exchange...

...Similarly, Rhodesian and South African tourism, formerly a major foreign exchange earner, has dried up, adding to an unhealthy balance of payments deficit...

...Commercial agriculture, though, is stagnating...

...Production in all sectors of the economy has declined to as low as a third of former levels...

...That explains why Mozambique has opened only one embassy (in neighboring Swaziland...

...But it may take years before this plan is fully operational...

...The prisons, mental "decolonization" and rural "re-education" camps hold more political detainees today than at any time during the Portuguese regime...

...The victorious Front for the National Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) has been raked by purges and dissention...

...Substitutes will have to be found, too, for the large quantities of relatively cheap goods that had been imported...

...It will probably have a long time to seek a solution...

...National reconstruction is an uncertain business at best, and where Mozambique is concerned economic normalization cannot really be achieved until there is majority rule in Rhodesia...

...Unfortunately, the country's vast array of interrelated political and economic problems are unlikely to be resolved soon...

...Among other things, the visit may put an end to the common characterization of Machel as a Maoist...

...United Nations Assistant Secretary General Abulrahim Abby Farah told the General Assembly that Mozambique would need as much as $400 million during the next two years to compensate for the losses...

...Frelimo, rushing to implement Socialist policies and prevent the emergence of a bourgeosie that might eventually challenge the revolution, hastily nationalized lands, buildings, rented houses, schools, legal services, health care, major industries, and small factories...

...South African personnel have replaced the Portuguese on Mozambique's railways and harbors, making them, some say, the most efficient in Africa...

...The peasants, besides being unable to continue producing as before, know nothing about marketing...

...For despite the government's determination to press ahead in the face of disapproval already expressed by peasants in some areas, experienced personnel are in severely short supply throughout the country...

...And President Samora Machel, fearful of domestic uprisings as well as possible interference from South Africa, Rhodesia and the thosuands of unhappy Portuguese they have given refuge, has expended much of his new nation's meager resources on establishing one of the most rigid police states in Africa...

...The trouble begins beneath that level and goes down to such vital matters as having too few hands available to type or man the telephones...

...President Machel has told his countrymen the arrangements would have to continue because Mozambique's own economy cannot absorb the workers...

...Interestingly, Maputo's tiny corps of senior administrators is by all accounts excellent...

...In the North, meanwhile, there have been continuing insurgencies among both the Macua, the country's largest tribe with a long history of opposing Frelimo, and the Makonde, the tribe most closely associated with the party...

...Most educated whites, of course, fled the country shortly after independence...

...Most crops had been raised on plantations controlled by nationalized Portuguese monopolies...

...Within four months of taking office, Machel created the National Service of Popular Security...

...The national economy, never developed by Lisbon, has virtually collapsed...

...Officials are confident the production of traditional exports such as sugar, tea and cashews will gradually recover, and Mozambique is well enough endowed with natural resources to eventually end its inherited state of poverty...

...Many countries, including Britain, the United States and West Germany, have pledged assistance, but Mozambique is suspicious of Western intentions...

...The rash of government takeovers frightened away all but a quarter of the 175,000 Portuguese settlers living here in 1974, with the result that the country now suffers a critical shortage of professionals and skilled workers...