Maputo, 08 Apr (AIM) – Mozambique’s former Finance Minister, Manuel Chang, returned to Maputo on Sunday, after serving a 102-month sentence for fraud and money laundering for his role in Mozambique’s biggest scandal, known as the “hidden debts” case.

The term “hidden debts” refers to the scheme through which three fraudulent Mozambican state-owned companies, Proindicus, Ematum (Empresa Moçambicana de Atum) and MAM (Mozambique Asset Management), all managed by the SISE security service, obtained loans worth more than two billion US dollars from Credit Suisse and VTB banks in Russia.

No bank in its right mind would grant such large loans to companies with no track record and managed by an intelligence service. But any doubts Credit Suisse and VTB may have had were overcome when Chang, as Finance Minister, signed sovereign guarantees, which meant that if companies defaulted, the Mozambican state would reimburse the banks.

And sure enough, the three companies quickly went bankrupt, and so the hidden loans turned into hidden debts. The guarantees signed by Chang were illegal, as the loans exceeded the maximum loan limit established under the 2013 and 2014 budget laws.

The loans were a corrupt scheme devised by the Abu Dhabi-based Privinvest group, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars bribing Mozambican officials (including Chang) and Credit Suisse bankers. Under these agreements, Privinvest became the sole contractor of the three fake companies and sold them fishing boats, radar stations and other assets at highly inflated prices.

Chang was arrested at Johannesburg International Airport in December 2018 on the basis of an international arrest warrant issued by US prosecutors. Because American investors were among those duped in the scandal, the US wanted Chang to stand trial in New York.

Belatedly, Mozambican authorities stated that Chang should be put on trial in Maputo. Chang’s lawyers worked for five years to avoid extradition to the US. Eventually, they failed and in 2023 Chang was deported from Johannesburg to New York.

He was found guilty of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, and Judge Nicholas Garaufis sentenced him to eight and a half years in prison.

Chang’s defense team tried to secure his early release for health reasons. The judge rejected the request because he did not believe the lawyers had provided convincing evidence of any serious medical condition that would justify early release.

Chang was released from a US federal prison on March 26, but an attempt to deport him immediately failed. Chang’s lawyers bought him a plane ticket from Boston to Maputo, via Lisbon – but the Portuguese airline TAP wouldn’t allow him to board the plane.

Chang was detained by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency at Boston’s Logan Airport because his emergency travel document, issued by the Mozambique embassy in Lisbon, was not previously authorized by Portuguese authorities (who would be responsible for the former minister during his transit).

Therefore, Chang remained in ICE custody until this bureaucratic problem could be resolved.

According to Radio France International, the deportation was postponed until Sunday, when he was placed on a regular Ethiopian Airways flight from Addis Ababa to Maputo, arriving in the Mozambican capital in the early afternoon.

Before the trial in New York, Mozambique’s Attorney General’s Office (PGR) repeatedly insisted that Mozambique was the only country with the legitimacy to put Chang on trial.

In effect, the PGR had drawn up a long list of crimes for which it intended to charge Chang. But no attempt was made to arrest Chang when he arrived.
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Maputo, 08 Apr (AIM) – Residents of the village of Mucojo, Macomia district, Cabo Delgado province, northern Mozambique, expressed their concern about the movement of suspected Islamic terrorists in the region.

According to local sources, cited by Agência Notícias Portuguesa (Lusa), the alleged terrorists appear as civilians among the residents and, after a few days, disappear, leaving residents worried and afraid of possible attacks.

“Sometimes people appear there and then disappear, without the communities knowing exactly where they are going,” said a source.

The sources explained that some suspects are young people from the community, allegedly members of the armed group that carries out jihadist attacks in Cabo Delgado.

“Some are not strangers, they are from Mucojo, but they stay and then disappear without saying where they are going,” said another source.

According to residents, the reports are known to the Mozambican Defense and Security Forces, who have been on the ground to monitor the situation.

“The forces are aware and are always present in coordination with the communities, monitoring and doing everything to prevent infiltrators,” said a source.

The gas-rich province of Cabo Delgado has been the target of extremist attacks since 2017, when terrorists attacked the Mocímboa da Praia district.
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Maputo, 8 April (AIM) – The Rwandan government revealed that it has more than 6,300 soldiers deployed in Northern Mozambique to support the fight against Islamic terrorists.

The Rwandan Forces were deployed in 2021 at the request of the Mozambican government to support the fight against jihadist groups operating in the region.

According to Rwandan government spokesperson Yolande Makolo, this number is three times higher than the number sent in 2021 and therefore a “sustainable financing framework is needed to continue”.

The Rwandan government had already announced that the Rwandan military presence in Mozambique depends on “adequate and predictable” financing. The announcement comes at a time when financial support from the European Peace Mechanism is set to expire in May “with no plans for renewal”, according to EU officials.

Rwanda has so far received around 40 million euros (46.7 million US dollars at the current exchange rate) in EU support for the counter-insurgency mission in Mozambique.

According to Makolo, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), the long-term deployment of Rwandan forces in joint counterterrorism operations in Mozambique requires a sustainable financing framework.

“Having so far borne the majority of the financial burden of these operations, a transition to more equitable financing is a strategic necessity,” she said.

She explained that it is up to the Mozambican government to provide the financing.

“Rwanda has not and will not seek additional funds from the European Peace Mechanism. This is an issue for Mozambique. Rwanda’s deployment requires sustainable financing, and it is up to the host government and its partners with large investments in Cabo Delgado to provide this, as it always has been,” she said.

“On the other hand, Rwanda is pleased to have been able to contribute together with our Mozambican allies to defeat terrorists, protect the residents of Cabo Delgado and allow the implementation of investments,” he added.

The spokesperson also said that civilians are the biggest beneficiaries of the joint security mission.

“Investments in gas benefit European and global security/energy interests, not those of Rwanda. Rwandan forces are present in Cabo Delgado in response to the Government of Mozambique’s request for support,” Makolo said.

Last March, the US government imposed sanctions against the Rwandan Armed Forces and four senior Rwandan officials appointed as a result of “direct operational support to the March 23 Movement (M23) and its affiliates in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)”.

The M23 rebels are said to be representatives of the Rwandan government, although Rwanda has repeatedly denied this.

The insurgency in Cabo Delgado, which broke out in 2017, paralyzed the construction of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) project, led by the French company TotalEnergies. But the work of the Mozambican defense and security forces and their Rwandan allies, particularly in the main districts of Palma and Mocímboa da Praia, allowed TotalEnergies to lift the state of force majeure it had declared in 2021.

In January this year, the French energy company and the Mozambican government agreed to resume construction of the project.
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Maputo, 8 April (AIM) – Mozambican Finance Minister, Carla Louveira, accused the World Bank of using outdated statistics in its latest report on Mozambique.

The report, entitled “Economic Update of Mozambique: From Fragility to Stability”, published in March, states that Mozambique is “the second poorest country and among the ten most unequal in the world”.

Just as the World Bank should have expected, this led to a series of media headlines announcing that Mozambique is “the second poorest country” on the planet.

This is obviously false. Anyone who accepts the World Bank’s claim would have us believe that Mozambique is poorer than war-torn hellholes like Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan or South Sudan.

This is far from the first time that the World Bank has spread falsehoods about Mozambique. In the late 1990s, for example, the Bank was at the forefront of an ideologically driven campaign to dismantle the cashew processing industry, using fraudulent statistics that made the extraordinary claim that processed cashew nuts were worth less than unprocessed nuts.

Today, in an equally poor quality exercise, the World Bank bases its statements about Mozambican poverty on figures that are years out of date. Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of the Mozambican Women’s Day celebrations on Tuesday in Maputo, Louveira said that, although the report is dated March 2026, the data is from 2019.

“The statistics used were collected during the Covid-19 pandemic period, and were published in 2022,” said Louveira. Furthermore, the World Bank report only analyzed “consumption poverty”, assessing whether families had enough money to purchase a “basic basket” of goods and services, while the Mozambican government has a broader definition of what it calls “multidimensional poverty”.

Furthermore, the Minister noted, the timeline used by the World Bank for the Mozambican case was different from that used for several other countries.

“In many of these countries”, said Louveira, “the comparative analysis was carried out with recent household surveys. If we used these more recent data, the picture in our country would obviously be different”.

Asked how the government managed to pay off, in advance, all of its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Louveira stressed that it did not use the State Budget.

“Our country has liquid international reserves available”, he highlighted, and the government paid the debt to the IMF using these reserves.

There was no risk of running out of reserves, which were still sufficient to pay for four to five months of imports of goods and services. Paying the debt to the IMF would only have “a slight impact”, he insisted.

The debt paid was 515.04 million Special Drawing Rights (equivalent to 603.1 million dollars).
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Maputo, 8 Apr (AIM) – The death toll in the collapse of an illegal gold mine in the Vanduzi district, in the central province of Manica, rose from nine to 11.

The tragedy occurred on Sunday in a notorious region of Minas Gerais known as “Seis Carros”.

The mining region of “Seis Carros” became one of the biggest centers of attraction for gold prospectors in Manica. It is estimated that more than ten thousand people, including Mozambicans and foreigners, look for gold there, despite the risks.

In addition to mining, several commercial activities are carried out on site, mostly carried out by young people, creating a parallel economy that has been growing outside the control of the authorities.

According to the police spokesman in Manica, Mouzinho Manasse, other victims continue to be treated in hospital.

“Ten people were buried and died on the spot, in addition to five injured. Of these, three were in serious condition and were transferred to the Chimoio Provincial Hospital. Upon arrival there, one died,” he said.

Manasseh added that health authorities say the hospitalized victims are in stable condition.

The disaster at the “Seis Carros” mine is not an isolated case. Manica has a history of accidents in artisanal mines, many of them associated with landslides during the rainy season.

Mozambican authorities have expressed concern about growing cases of illegal mining, which experts believe is one of the sources of financing for Islamic terrorists operating in parts of the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

According to the National Directorate of Geology and Mining, the country loses revenue of around 90 million meticais (1.4 million dollars) per year due to illegal mining.
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Maputo, 7 April (AIM) – Mozambican President, Daniel Chapo, launched on Tuesday a Fund for the Empowerment of Women, known as Empodera.

Marking Mozambican Women’s Day, celebrated every year on April 7th, Chapo stated “Empodera is an initiative that responds to one of the commitments made by our country: to promote women’s economic autonomy, expand their access to opportunities, support women’s productive initiatives, and create conditions for more women to move from a situation of vulnerability to prosperity, with dignity and hope”.

He added that the Empodera program also enshrines the commitment to combat domestic violence, gender-based violence and the murder of women.

“Our goal is clear,” Chapo said. “We want women to be economically empowered and socially protected. We want girls with guaranteed rights and we want a society that does not accept violence as a destiny or silence as an answer.”

“We are committed to better conditions so that every woman and every girl can live with safety, dignity and hope”, declared the President.

Promoting the rights of women and girls “must be understood as a condition for peace, national unity, reconciliation, poverty reduction and the construction of a fairer and more developed Mozambique,” ​​Chapo added.

He recalled that the country’s first President, Samora Machel, once declared that “the emancipation of women is not an act of charity: it is a necessity of the revolution, a guarantee of its continuity and the condition of its triumph”.

Chapo said he was certain that “there will be no sustainable development, no lasting peace, no shared prosperity as long as barriers that prevent women from fully exercising their rights persist.”

“We want a society in which men and women realize their potential and participate in equal dignity and opportunities”, he declared. “For us, the promotion of Mozambican women is a matter of justice, democracy, development and the future of the nation”.

Chapo noted that great advances have already been made in empowering women: thus, there is almost parity between the sexes in Mozambican secondary education (49.9 percent of secondary school students are girls) and, in 2025, 97 percent of all registered births will occur in health facilities.

“No society will be truly free until its women are fully respected,” said Chapo. “No economy will be genuinely inclusive as long as its women do not have equal access to opportunities. And no democracy will be truly solid as long as silences imposed by fear, dependence or discrimination persist.”
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Maputo, 7 Apr (AIM) – Genuína Nangundo, administrator of the Montepuez district, Cabo Delgado province, northern Mozambique, accused foreign citizens of recruiting young people to create instability and facilitate illegal gold mining.

According to the administrator, quoted by Rádio Moçambique, these young people are being recruited at the administrative post in Nairoto.

She alleged that the foreign nationals in question also resort to misinformation about how cholera spreads to incite disorder in communities. She did not specify the nationality of the alleged foreigners.

According to Nangundo, at least two individuals, considered ringleaders, were arrested following acts of vandalism that culminated in the destruction of the headquarters and residence of the head of the town of Macololo a few days ago.

“Foreigners give young people money, recruit them to work in the mines. They end up acting like bosses, while our young people enter the mines, extract the gold and hand it over to them,” he said. No evidence was offered for these claims.

Nangundo added that the spread of misinformation about cholera was used as a pretext to destabilize local governance.

“A strange environment was created. There was misinformation about cholera as a strategy to disorganize the local government and allow them to continue their illegal activities,” she said.

Due to insecurity, the head of the Nairoto administrative post and the head of the Macololo locality temporarily left their areas of jurisdiction for fear that their lives were in danger.

The administrator appealed to young people not to be manipulated by financial promises, warning that such practices put sovereignty and territorial integrity at risk. “Young people must be vigilant. They cannot compromise the future of their homeland for immediate gains,” he added.
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Nampula (Mozambique), 7 April (AIM) – Mozambican President Daniel Chapo announced that the government may introduce measures at the beginning of May to guarantee the stability of fuel supplies and protect domestic consumption, in order to respond to the fuel crisis resulting from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz due to the US-Israel war of aggression against Iran.

The Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman, is the transport route for around 20% of the oil traded worldwide and a significant part of the liquefied natural gas transported by sea. However, the waterway is under Iranian control and the Iranians are not allowing most ships to pass through. Mozambique also imports fertilizers through the Strait of Hormuz.

According to the President, speaking on Monday in the city of Nampula, in the north of the country, at a ceremony in which he delivered more than 100 public transport buses to 15 municipalities, “we are waiting for the war to end as quickly as possible so that fuel prices stabilize. But, if it doesn’t end, there will come a time when fuels will start to reach new prices, and this could lead us to take measures, as happened during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

“When that moment comes, we will take measures. One of these actions is what we are anticipating with the introduction of these buses. Being public transport, even if the price increases, the State will have to subsidize it so that people continue to pay the same price”, he said.

The President explained that Mozambique still has fuel reserves acquired before the start of the US-Israel attack against Iran, which will allow it to keep prices stable until the end of April or beginning of May.

“We have fuel in the ports of Maputo, Beira and Nacala, purchased before the war. Furthermore, there were already ships on their way to the country with fuel purchased at the old prices,” he said.

Chapo also condemned false reports about alleged fuel shortages. “There are those who agitate our people, saying that tomorrow there will be no more fuel, creating a race for pumps. This is misinformation. The true information is what the government transmits regularly”, he stated.

The 100 new buses will be distributed across 15 municipalities in the Center and North regions of the country, representing an investment of more than 490 million meticais (around US$7.6 million at current exchange rates).

Chapo said that this measure “is not just an administrative act, but a specific step towards bringing Mozambicans closer to opportunities and improving the living conditions of our people”, he said.

According to the President, the introduction of new buses will reduce waiting times at stops, increase transport capacity and improve safety levels in the beneficiary cities.

It is estimated that the buses benefit approximately 780 thousand passengers per month, equivalent to more than nine million trips per year.

Chapo also highlighted that many of the vehicles are powered by compressed natural gas, a solution that combines economic efficiency and environmental responsibility, aligning the country with global energy transition trends.

The initiative is part of a broader program that foresees the acquisition of 1,145 buses to strengthen urban and rural mobility across the country.

“The good management of these resources is a duty of the people we represent,” said Chapo. He urged his audience to “drive with respect and a sense of mission, because these buses transport citizens who trust in the safety of the public service”.

The buses, he added, are a concrete step in building a more integrated, more productive country concerned with the well-being of its people.
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Maputo, 6 April (AIM) – Climate change is no longer a distant threat, Mozambican President Daniel Chapo warned on Monday.

Speaking in the flood-hit Guijá district of southern Gaza province, Chapo said climate change “is a reality that worsens the vulnerability of our production system and our rural communities.”

Much of Mozambique, especially the southern provinces, faced devastating floods in January and again in March. The floods, Chapo said, “compromised harvests, affected livestock and fishing, and endangered the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of families.”

But, “although we know well the strength of flood waters, we know even better the strength of our people – a people who never give up, who always get up and transform adversity into determination”.

Chapo insisted that the solution involves increasing agricultural production, although he recognizes that the 2025/2026 agricultural season “is one of the most demanding seasons in recent years. Torrential rains and strong floods have tested our productive capacity and the resilience of our communities”.

“The data is clear and demands responsibility and firm action from us,” he continued. “Around 441 thousand hectares of crops were affected with a direct impact on strategic crops such as corn and rice”,

The loss of pastures affected more than 428,000 head of cattle and there were significant losses of boats and fishing equipment. “The productive base of 335 thousand families has been weakened,” said Chapo.

“It is not enough to respond to the emergency”, declared the President. “It is imperative that we transform the way we produce and prepare for the future. We must continue to invest in climate-adapted agricultural technologies, expand the rehabilitation of irrigation systems, manage our natural resources sustainably and build resilient infrastructure.”

“Our response as a State must rise to the challenge and that is why I am here,” said Chapo.

The government was far from indifferent to natural disasters, Chapo stressed. “We acted, mobilized resources and coordinated efforts, not only to guarantee immediate assistance, but above all to restore the productive capacity of our people,” said Chapo. “Our objective is not to return to the starting point, but to advance to a new level of production, resilience and food security.”

At the Guijá ceremony, Chapo announced the delivery of 161,000 agricultural kits to small producers, 359 fishing boats and several other inputs. They were “opportunities to start a new stage. The waters are receding, there is mud everywhere and the conditions are favorable to sow seeds and start producing.”
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