Mozambique needs a social rehabilitation plan above the National Development Strategy 2025–2044

Paulo Vilanculo "

This article seeks to explore the contradictions between the official development rhetoric and the real impacts of energy projects and agrarian policies in Mozambique, highlighting lessons learned and proposing alternative paths towards truly inclusive development, with a view to the National Development Strategy 2025–2044 (ENDE), recently approved by the Mozambican Parliament, which proposes an ambitious path towards industrialization, economic diversification and energy transition. The ENDE 2025–2044 establishes guidelines for Mozambique’s development over the next two decades, with a focus on industrialization, economic diversification and energy transition. Prime Minister Benvinda Levi highlighted that the ENDE is an instrument for all Mozambicans, not just the government, and that it should be seen as a compass to guide the country’s inclusive and sustainable development process, with goals such as achieving 100% access to electricity by 2030 and becoming a low-carbon economy by 2050. The document is presented as a guide for inclusive and sustainable development (MEF, 2024). The document emphasizes the need for a diversified and efficient economy, driven by a strengthened private sector committed to improving the population's quality of life. Despite ambitious goals, such as achieving 100% access to electricity by 2030, there are concerns about the effective implementation of these strategies, especially considering the historical challenges faced by previous policies. Especially when we analyze emblematic projects such as the future Mphanda Nkuwa hydroelectric dam on the Zambezi River, often presented as drivers of development, they often raise doubts about the real beneficiaries of these initiatives. At the same time, the failure of the Action Plan for the Reduction of Absolute Poverty (PARPA) to promote equitable and sustainable development that promised to transform the Mozambican agricultural sector serves as a warning of the risks of policies that are disconnected from the social and economic realities of the country. Institutional discontinuity may be a possibility of political instrumentalization of the ENDE for the purposes of manipulating power, which could even be used as a symbolic (or even strategic) justification to extend the time in power rather than a real development plan properly designed for social good. The collapse of the ambitious Sustenta program, an initiative of the Mozambican government, officially launched by the government with the aim of transforming family farming into a more commercial, productive and sustainable activity, with a view to supporting small farmers with access to inputs, technical assistance, financing and markets, within a logic of productive inclusion and combating rural poverty. However, despite the initial ambitions, the program faced serious challenges and ended up collapsing in several aspects, such as: Misappropriation and mismanagement of funds; Top-down implementation with exclusion of farmers; Unsustainable financing model; Precarious infrastructure and logistics; Political instrumentalization and lack of alignment with local realities. The failure highlights the difficulty of implementing public policies in a participatory, transparent and local context-adapted manner and also dialogues with the legacy of other agrarian policies in Mozambique, such as PARPA, and reinforces the need to rethink development strategies based on peasant autonomy, social justice and ecological sustainability. Thus, the ENDE, conceived as a development instrument, can also be read as a government maintenance project, or even as a possible pretext for an attempt to revise the constitution to make four consecutive terms of office viable for the executive. In times of tension between constitutional legality and the ambitions of the government, it is curious, and perhaps ironic, that the approval of a strategy with targets until 2044 can serve, even symbolically, as an argument to support the continuity of the same government leadership. This tension between institutional continuity, the ambitions of the government and the rhetoric of "long-term" development demands a critical reading of the place of the ENDE within the current Mozambican political project. Mozambique cannot develop sustainably without comprehensive economic and social rehabilitation. Development is not just about economic growth.Development involves improving the quality of life of the population: health, education, access to land, food security, not just increasing macroeconomic figures. Many of the indicators that point to “growth” (such as GDP) hide deep inequalities. In Mozambique, despite years of growth driven by megaprojects (gas, coal, hydroelectricity), multidimensional poverty remains high, especially in rural areas. Mozambique is burdened by structural inequality, collapse of public services and institutional fragility. Continued social exclusion fuels tensions and weakens the social fabric necessary for any economic transformation. Social rehabilitation means: • Investment in quality education, • Promotion of gender equity, • Territorial justice (rural vs urban areas), • Reconciliation in conflict-affected regions. On the other hand, an economy without social justice is unstable.The lack of real opportunities for the majority of the population makes growth unsustainable. The Mozambican economy has been highly extractive (based on the exploitation of natural resources by foreign companies), without generating local value chains, decent jobs or productive inclusion. Economic rehabilitation should involve: • Support small and medium-sized businesses, • Invest in family farming, • Strengthen domestic markets, • Democratize access to credit and land. Furthermore, without justice, there is no peace and without peace, there is no development. In a society with cArmed conflicts in Cabo Delgado, political tensions and crises of trust between the State and the population are reflections of a national project that needs to be reconfigured. In this context, social rehabilitation also means rehabilitating the social contract, trust in institutions and the legitimacy of the State. We conclude by reaffirming that Mozambique is facing a historic dilemma by continuing to rely on exclusionary and dependent growth models, instead of reconfiguring the country based on economic and social rehabilitation. The second path requires political courage, real decentralization, equitable and distributive justice and the valorization of local communities as protagonists.

2025/12/3