"Corruption has deepened and nepotism" Minister of Samora Machel

Mozambique is currently plunged into “a deep political, economic and social crisis”, with the country shrouded in “corruption, nepotism and social exclusion”, warned one of the founding figures of Mozambican law, Rui Baltazar, on Wednesday.Baltazar is a moral beacon for Mozambican society. A staunch anti-fascist, he began his career in the late colonial period, when he was one of the few lawyers who defended Mozambican nationalists in the colonial courts. After independence, the country’s first President, Samora Machel, appointed him Justice Minister, and then Finance Minister. Later he served as Vice-Chancellor of the country’s oldest higher education institution, the Eduardo Mondlane University, and his career perhaps reached its peak when he became the first chairperson of the Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law.Invited by the Mozambican Bar Association (OAM) to give the keynote speech at the inauguration of the OAM’s new chairperson, Flavio Menete, Baltazar declared that “for far too long, our country has lived through situations of instability and insecurity”.

“Serious violations of fundamental rights and freedoms proliferate”, he continued. “Attacks on the lives and physical and moral integrity of citizens are committed with complete impunity, which generates the feeling that there exist parallel and hidden powers”. 

“In the recent past”, said Baltazar, “we lived through a period in which political power was exercised in an authoritarian manner, with great opacity, and with a hollow and ostentatious formal apparatus”. 

This had “a perverse demonstration effect” and was replicated at other levels of political and administrative life “weakening the rule of law which the Constitution proclaims and which is less and less reflected in national reality”.

The separation of powers was diluted, he added, “with an excessive and disproportionate predominance of the executive”. 

Corruption had spread and become worse, as had “the undue use of state assets, nepotism and the assault on public property which ought to be used for the benefit of the people”.

Baltazar named no names, but when he criticized the “premature and dangerous euphoria” over Mozambique’s natural resource boom, he can only have been referring to the previous government headed by President Armando Guebuza.

That euphoria, sparked off by massive coal and gas discoveries, “favours waste and megalomanias based on the energy eldorados that were announced, with all the damaging consequences that we now have to face”.Effective mechanisms for “dialogue and inclusion and for overcoming ideological, economic, social and political cleavages” either did not exist or were not operational, and the result was a “loss of the sense of the national interest”.But Baltazar declared that he remains an optimist and the purpose of reciting the country’s current woes was to alert lawyers to “the difficult challenges and dangers that are ahead of you and to encourage you to face them with courage and determination”. The activity of lawyers was “eminently social”, he argued, reminding his audience that the Statutes of the OAM “contain essential values and principles such as integrity, independence, the quality of serving justice and law, duty to the community, transparency, and professional secrecy”.Under the conditions currently prevailing in Mozambique, “lawyers should be much stricter in observing these principles”, Baltazar stressed, “and the OAM should be more vigilant in preventing and punishing violations by its members”.

The coming period will not be easy, he warned, “and the moral fibre and spirit of struggle of all of you will be put to the test. Do not let yourselves be intimidated by threats, or enticed by false promises. Your best defence lies in the competence and honesty with which you exercise your duties, in scrupulous obedience to the law and to the rules which guide the exercise of the profession”.Casting his mind back over his own career, Baltazar said “if my experience can serve as any inspiration for you, believe me when I tell you that the most exciting moments I lived through as a lawyer were when, during the night of colonial rule, without any payment, I defended political prisoners and succeeded in having them acquitted and released from jail”.He recalled that at Mozambican independence, in 1975, the number of Mozambicans with law degrees could be counted on the fingers of two hands. But now he was facing a room full of lawyers who had qualified during the decades of independence, and that alone was “irrefutable proof that the fight against colonialism was worthwhile, that it was worthwhile participating in the building of a new country, and it remains worthwhile to put our capacities and energies at the service of the Mozambican people”.

-Dr. Rui Baltazar Dos Santos Alves, was born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in 1933. He earned a law degree (1956) and completed the Complementary Course of Political and Economic Sciences (1958) at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. From September 1974 until the independence of Mozambique, he served as Minister of Justice of Mozambique's transitional government, functions that remained after independence declaration in 1975 and until 1978 (left, second row first) still .Exercise the Deputy functions, the Minister of Finance (1978-1986), Rector of the University Eduardo Mondlane (1986-1990), professor at the same Law Faculty of the University (1990-1994), Ambassador of Mozambique in the Kingdom of Sweden (1994-2001) and Advisor to the President of the Republic of Mozambique (2002-2004) .First President of the Constitutional Council held positions of 2003-2009