Election spotlights development divide

Tinico Wguenya props his motorbike against a tree among the sugar cane fields of Xinavane, 140 km north of Mozambique's capital, Maputo. "Today we are content, and FRELIMO [the ruling party] did this - they will let us develop more, but with the other parties we do not know what the future holds," he said. The country goes to the polls on 1 December and the little town of Xinavane would be a good place to visit if you are looking for evidence of Mozambique's post-war economic success. The colonial building that was the nucleus of the old sugar factory still exists, but is now surrounded by sprawling factories and air-conditioned offices: 5,000 people have jobs in the industries based around the sugar plant owned by South African company Tongaat-Hulett. Some of them commute on a weekly basis from homes in Maputo, little more than an hour away on a road rebuilt after the war, and already being widened to cope with the additional traffic. Wguenya cautioned that "unemployment is still a problem, and salaries are low" but, on balance, there is no doubt that life in Xinavane has improved markedly since the end of Mozambique's civil war in 1992. Two thousand kilometres to the north, the houses of Marrere cluster under the tall cashew and mango trees of Nampula province. The most extravagant signs of wealth are a couple of bicycles. "With the money from selling 5kg of peanuts we can maybe buy one fish," said farmer Maria Muheka. "In 1990, with that money we could have bought clothes for the family, as well as some fish, and still have money left over for the hospital." The trade liberalisation policies that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank imposed on post-war Mozambique as a condition for budget support and financing public services have hit the north badly. The fixed-price system, which guaranteed peasants a minimum income, has been abolished, and the state-owned cashew nut processing factories that once provided 2,000 jobs were privatised and then closed, as the new owners showed little interest in making them profitable. "What happened cannot be justified," said Manuel Tome, leader of FRELIMO's parliamentary bench. "One may criticise the weakness of the government with respect to the IMF and World Bank - this was discussed for a long time, then, in the end, the World Bank said accept this, or we will not finance education and health." On the fringes of Nampula town, warehouse-like businesses pay 9,500 meticais ($0.50) per kilogram of cashew nuts to the middlemen, who buy them from the farmers, who get much less. Cashews are now exported in their raw state to India and Mozambique has lost the added value of processing the nuts domestically. Next to the small mountain of cashews in the back of the warehouse there is a larger mountain of stacked-up bales of clothing: all of it imported, second-hand, from Canada. Besides the global fall in cotton prices, these imports have damaged the cotton industry, which was once another key source of revenue in northern Mozambique. "Between 1990 and 2002, 140,000 jobs were lost," said Francisco Mazoio of the Mozambican Workers' Organisation (OTM). "Jobs created by the new investments only covered 40 percent of those that had been lost." Although there there was a net loss of jobs nationally, the north suffered most, and gains were almost exclusively in the south. "FRELIMO leaders are historically mostly from the south, so it is easy to blame them," said Ismail Ossemane, chairperson of the National Peasants' Union. "But an economist might disagree. The interior of Maputo or Gaza province [in the south] is no more developed than other provinces. Even in Maputo [the capital], you have Holiday Inns, but outside the children are eating from the rubbish bins." The preponderance of investment in the south is not entirely the government's fault, as Tome pointed out. "If you are South African, it makes sense to invest in the south; if your factory is 3,000 km from South Africa, it increases costs in terms of time and money." Basic infrastructure in the north - roads and telecommunications for example - is eventually starting to catch up with the south. A titanium-mining project planned for Nampula province will challenge the south's monopoly on heavy industry.