Complicit Bureaucracy and Selective Licensing: When the State Chooses Who Can Thrive in Mozambique

Alípio Freeman "

The Mozambican state shows no concern for qualitatively improving the business environment, being structured in a way that makes it difficult for small businesses to access the benefits, thus condemning them to continue disappearing, medium-sized businesses to shrink to small ones, and the big players to prosper in a context of unfair competition, protectionist on the part of those who should be promoting free access to the country's resources.

The Mozambican state has failed to free itself from the shackles of the oligarchs associated with the ruling party, who have deeply captured the state, causing institutions to function according to their dictates. In this context, the granting of licenses for critical and high-impact areas is deliberately structured in an exclusionary manner to limit the entry of small entrepreneurs, that is, the entry of unwanted guests. The way in which public institutions responsible for mining, fishing, and agriculture have conducted the business licensing process reveals what we consider to be the problem here. What should be an instrument of regulation, economic order, and promotion of national investment has, in practice, become a mechanism to block Mozambican entrepreneurship and a selective filter that favors economic elites linked to the system and foreign interests with privileged access to power.

The state bureaucracy, far from being neutral or merely technical, has become an active accomplice in an economic model that chooses winners from the start and pushes the majority to economic marginality. This is not about isolated failures or occasional administrative inefficiency, but about a structured, coordinated, and reiterated logic that defines who can prosper and who must remain confined to survival activities.

This reality is evident every day. On one hand, small and medium-sized Mozambican entrepreneurs crowd into long and exhausting queues at the Single Service Counters (BAUs), subjected to successive demands, prohibitive fees, and endless processes. On the other hand, large economic groups, the so-called "sharks," license their companies with impressive speed and conduct business in luxury hotels.

This surgical selectivity transforms the State into the main definer of access to national resources, distorting competition and perpetuating a model of wealth concentration. Costs such as approximately 500,000.00 MT for maritime logistics licenses act as barriers to economic exclusion.

Absurd requirements such as authorization from recipient countries for grain exports reveal a reversal of economic sovereignty. The case of cashew nuts, monopolized by a foreign company, symbolizes the capture of the system by protected interests.

This model destroys the possibility of a strong national business class, perpetuates external dependence, and pushes Mozambicans into marginal activities, while strategic sectors remain inaccessible.

The social consequences are profound. Economic exclusion fuels inequality, resentment, and instability. In Cabo Delgado, many analysts point to the concentration of resource benefits in the hands of elites as one of the structural factors of the insurgency.

Economic exclusion also produces forced internal migration. Young people from resource-rich provinces abandon their lands and migrate to Maputo, not to prosper, but to survive by selling credit, working in agriculture, or as domestic servants, while the wealth of their regions continues to be drained.

This phenomenon exposes the State's failure to create local development and also reveals the failure of the education system to train real entrepreneurs. Education remains theoretical, disconnected from productive reality, training candidates for non-existent jobs, and not wealth creators capable of facing bureaucracy and integrating into value chains.

Thus, a vicious cycle is formed: educated but excluded young people, rich but impoverished territories, and a country where hope migrates only to dissolve into informality.

This yellow card is a political and social warning. To persist in a complicit and selective bureaucracy is to consciously compromise the country's future, wasting its youth and deepening economic injustice.

2025/12/3