(Bloomberg) -- Tensions are high in Mozambique after riots broke out in the capital on Thursday night when authorities announced a resounding victory for the ruling party in an election the opposition said was rigged.
Violent protests caused the temporary closure of the main land crossing with South Africa at Ressano Garcia, state-owned Agência de Informação de Moçambique reported. By mid-morning Friday, makeshift barriers still blocked one of the main roads in Maputo, the capital, it said.
The demonstrations have sent the nation’s dollar bonds plunging and raised questions about how the election dispute will end. Mozambique is home to a $20 billion natural gas export plant that TotalEnergies SE plans, which an insurgency in the north of the country has already delayed for years.
Maputo’s streets were still deserted on Friday afternoon, said Adriano Nuvunga, director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights.
“It’s empty, totally empty,” he said, adding he expects young people will continue with their demonstrations, but with less intensity relative to Thursday. Mozambique has never seen post-election violence of that magnitude, he said.
“These young people are unemployed,” Nuvunga said by phone. “They have nothing to lose.”
The southeast African nation, where the median age is about 17, is one of the world’s least-developed. Almost three-quarters of its 35 million people live on less than $2.15 per day, according to the World Bank. One in three young people aren’t working or studying, government data shows.
Authorities arrested 371 people as a result of the protests since Thursday, Portuguese news agency Lusa cited a police spokesman as having said Friday.
Venâncio Mondlane, the charismatic opposition leader who was the runner-up in the presidential election, called for national strike and demonstrations on Thursday and Friday. He urged supporters to protest peacefully, but said they had the right to defend themselves against the police.
Daniel Chapo, the ruling Mozambique Liberation Front’s candidate, on Thursday evening discouraged people from joining protests and said the country needed peace to develop.
Mondlane won 20% of the vote compared with Chapo’s 71%, according to the official results that the opposition dismissed as fraudulent. Numerous election observers have flagged a raft of irregularities, including ballot-box stuffing and altering the tallies.
Frelimo, as the governing party is known, increased its control of parliament to 195 seats out of 250.
For the first time since multi-party elections started in 1994, Mozambique has a new main opposition party. The Mozambique National Resistance, or Renamo, saw its support collapse. Its presidential candidate, Ossufo Momade, got less than 6% of the vote, while the party emerged with only 20 seats in parliament. Podemos, the party backing Mondlane, got 31.
Renamo’s popularity plunged since the death of its long-time leader Afonso Dhlakama in 2018. He’d led the party when it was a rebel group that waged a civil war against Frelimo that left about a million people dead before a peace deal in 1992.
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Mondlane, who has a major following on social media, quit Renamo earlier this year after it blocked him from challenging Momade’s leadership.
The Podemos-backed leader “might see mass mobilization now as a good way to boost his profile even further,” Louw Nel, analyst at Oxford Economics Africa, said in a note late Thursday. “Chapo will need to reach across the aisle, and quickly,” to avoid a repeat of the unrest that followed the municipal elections in Mozambique last year, he said.
Mondlane drew large crowds of young people at campaign rallies, promising them a greater share of the nation’s natural resources. Mozambique has some of Africa’s biggest natural-gas reserves, but an Islamic State-backed insurgency has delayed the expected windfall.
In a livestream on Facebook late on Thursday night, Mondlane again repudiated the election results that he called “totally absurd.” From an undisclosed location, he repeated calls for demonstrations on Friday, by which time the video had more than 1.5 million views.
“The revolution has arrived,” he said, echoing words his former party’s rebel leader used. “The time has come.”
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(Updates with comment from analyst in fourth paragraph.)
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