Mozambique is less peaceful than ten years ago

Mozambique has lost 10 places in the ranking of the Global Peace Index (GPI) conceived and published by the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP), based in Autralia. It now ranks 78^th from 68^th last year, behind Swaziland and before Benin.TheIEP is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think-tank dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress. Its GPI comprises 23 indicators of the violence or fear of violence, these being originally selected with the assistance of the expert panel in 2007 and have been reviewed by the expert panel on an annual basis.

Looking back over a ten year period to 2008, Mozambique now features at the bottom of the 10 most at risk countries in 2008. The report also shows a list of 20 countries that fell into conflict after 2008. These are all countries that did not have battle deaths in 2008, but subsequently experienced more than 25 battle deaths in any given year. Of these 20 countries, two are in the top 10 countries most at risk, including Syria, Mozambique, Angola, Cameroon and Yemen.In mid-2013, after more than twenty years of peace, rebel group Renamo insurgency was renewed in the central and northern regions of the country. Former Mozambican president Armando Guebuza and the leader of Renamo, Afonso Dhlakama, signed in September 2014 the Accord on Cessation of Hostilities, which brought the military hostilities to a halt before the general election that took place in October that same year.

Those elections were unfortunately followed by a new political crisis, bringing Mozambique back into violence, after Renamo said it did not recognize the validity of the election results, demanding the control of six provinces (Nampula, Niassa,Tete, Zambezia, Sofala, and Manica) where they claim to have won a majority.Globally, the Sub-Saharan continent’s average score has deteriorated again this year, though its global position in the GPI, ahead of Russia and Eurasia, remains unchanged. Ethiopia suffered the biggest decline, both in the region and globally, as violent demonstrations, partly driven by rising ethnic tensions, led the government to introduce a six-month state of emergency in October 2016.In Lesotho, political tensions have remained at a high level, in the wake of an attempted military coup in 2014, and political instability has been exacerbated by the recent collapse of the ruling coalition. In Burundi, the number and duration of internal conflicts and the likelihood of violent demonstrations remain a major drag on the country’s score.

“What began as a series of protests against the controversial re-election of the president in 2015 has evolved into a loosely organized resistance movement, with the targeted assassination by rebel groups of senior government and military officials”, recalls the IEP in its report.Finally, the IEP underscores that if the Positive Peace deficit model (PPDM) had been used as a forecasting tool for allocating peacebuilding funding, the ten most ‘at risk’ countries in 2008 would have been allocated a peacebuilding amount totaling $47.3 billion over the next ten years (in constant 2014 dollars) calculated at the unit-cost rate ($27 per capita per year), between 2008 and 2017. As a reminder, the PPDM provides a reasonable assessment of countries at risk of deteriorations in peace and compared to other models it provides a more accurate predictive capacity.