The award of the first Mo Ibrahim prize to a retired African head of state has rightly gone to Mozambique’s former President Joaquim Chissano. This is a man who, when he first met the rebel RENAMO leader Afonso Dhaklama in 1991, asked immediately “Do you want peace?” The RENAMO leader whose guerrillas had been backed by the apartheid South African regime said, “Yes”. Only then did Chissano hold out his hand for Dhaklama to shake and said, “Then this is the sign of peace”.
It was a telling gesture of the statesmanship that Chissano brought to the leadership of the troubled East African country, where he became president in 1986 when Samora Machel was killed in a plane crash. Chissano took over a country brutalized by civil war and plunged into economic chaos by the Marxist-Leninist FRELIMO government instituted in 1977, two years after the Portuguese colonial rulers withdrew.
It took three years of careful political maneuvering before Chissano was able to persuade FRELIMO to abandon the command economy and open up the country to foreign investment. Within another year, he had won agreement to change the constitution to allow multiparty politics and opened peace talks directly with RENAMO. In 1995 Chissano took Mozambique into the Commonwealth, the first member state that had not at one time been run by the British. In 1999, he won a second presidential election which was characterized by international electors as fully free and fair. His defeated opponent was RENAMO’s Dhaklama, whose supporters rioted in protest with 40 dying. Observers believe that the president was sincere when he deplored the subsequent loss of life of some 80 RENAMO rioters who had been rounded up after the protests and crowded into small prison cells. In 2002 Chissano decided that he would not seek a third term as president and retired into private life. This in itself is unusual among African leaders who, like Malawi’s Hastings Banda and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, appear to believe that once in power they have an inalienable right to keep the job. In stepping down Chissano emulated the example of one of Africa’s most honorable and esteemed leaders, Julius Nyrere of Tanzania.
Chissano’s award given by a panel chaired by ex-UN chief Kofi Annan, recognizes his pragmatism and statesmanship in turning around a country assailed not only by doctrinaire politics and internal rebellion but also natural disasters such as the devastating floods of 2000 and 2001. Mozambique still has far to go but Chissano laid the foundations upon which his country can now build. It is interesting that Mo Ibrahim, the wealthy mobile telephone businessman who instituted this $5 million award, is Sudanese. His country also once displayed outstanding statesmanship in 2005 by negotiating an end to the 21-year civil war in southern Sudan which cost 1.5 million lives. Tragically, the power-sharing government that emerged now looks in danger of collapse and the Darfur crisis worsens.
