Country Comparison: Angola & Mozambique

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Recommended: Mozambique effects of colonialism

In order to achieve a clear understanding of Mozambique’s current economic and political state, a thorough look back at its historical past is certainly needed. Mozambique won a rushed independence from Portugal’s colonial hand in 1975. This was a result of a combination of factors, of which, arguably the most heavily handed was the protracted war of liberation against the Portuguese rule that begun in 1962, and ended 13 years later with the fall of Fascism in Portugal. The collapse of the Portuguese regime in 1974 paved the way for Mozambican independence under the Lusaka Peace Accord. Signed in haste, the Accord left political control of the African state to the Mozambique Liberation Front AKA Frelimo, with little discussion of political forms other than single-party rule. During this time, best described as revolution-esque , 220 000 Europeans, mostly of Portuguese origin, fled en mass, destroying and abandoning property in their wake. As the Europeans took flight, they extracted their capital, and “left Mozambique virtually devoid of civil servants, merchants, professionals, and most skilled or semi-skilled workers” (Howard, 2008, 181). At the time, Frelimo, A.K.A Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, the political party of which political control was left with, had no experience in running a state. They had little human or material means to rebuild their country, resulting in the legacy of colonial rule leaving longstanding consequences, which soon caused a devastating civil war claiming the lives of nearly 1 million people.
Struggling to stay afloat after the hurried departure of the Portuguese, Ferlimo had the difficult task of rapidly developing Mozambique’s economy. Leaning towards the adoption of socialist ideologies, th...

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...nce back as well as it has. Building on this principle of similar extractive legacies left behind, if one were to continue this comparative paper, it could be argued that adding an analytical section on Namibia would be beneficial. The principle reason for this is simply that while we saw little restructuring of institutional apparatuses post colonialism in ether Mozambique or Angola, this is not the case for Namibia, which has undergone far reaching territorial and institutional reorganization. While the process of liberalisation and democratisation is currently under way in Angola and Mozambique, I have yet to uncover evidence to suggest that any significant or committed institutional restructuring is predicted in either country. In this respect, the continuity from the inherited colonial extractive institutional structures seems likely to continue indefinitely.

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