Young Africans turning on liberation parties, opposition leader says

Young people across Africa have turned against ageing liberation parties for failing to deliver on their promises, Mozambique’s firebrand opposition leader said one year after leading the biggest protests in his country’s history.

Venâncio Mondlane told the Financial Times that Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo party, like that of anti-colonial parties from South Africa to Zimbabwe, had entered into a long-term decline.

“We’ve seen it all around the world, regime change, because the younger generation are tired,” Mondlane said in an interview in Maputo. “There is a similar situation in South Africa, in Angola, Zimbabwe. These parties, their days are numbered.”

A charismatic opposition politician, Mondlane in 2024 led protests that brought Mozambique to a standstill after an election victory he said was stolen from him, posing the biggest threat to Frelimo’s rule since it took power after independence in 1975.

He fled the country amid post-election violence in which 300 people were killed, returning in January to huge street celebrations. A few months later, he registered his own party for the first time, the National Alliance for a Free and Autonomous Mozambique, or Anamola, to rally support ahead of the next presidential election in 2029.

“I decided to return to my country and form my own party, and start again from zero, because I want to avoid more bloodshed,” Mondlane said. “If you reach power through elections, you have legitimacy.”

Across the region, young leaders are challenging independence parties.

South Africa’s ANC in 2024 was forced into a power-sharing coalition for the first time since the fall of apartheid. In neighbouring Botswana, a young, upstart candidate won a shock victory against the party that had ruled since 1966. And in Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe, anti-government protests have surged over the past year, rattling entrenched liberation-era parties.

Known simply as Venâncio — or VM7, a play on the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo’s nickname — the ambitious 51-year-old Mondlane said he won the 2024 polls that international observers said were marred by fraud and irregularities.

He rejected the official results, which gave Frelimo’s Daniel Chapo 65 per cent of the vote, and said his own tally gave him a winning share.

Mondlane, an engineer and former pastor, uses social media to deliver searing sermons against Frelimo and has continued drawing large numbers to anti-government rallies since his return to Mozambique.

In a country with a median age of 19, his criticisms of the government’s handling of the economy have struck a chord among young people. Mozambique remains one of the world’s poorest nations despite hosting some of the world’s biggest LNG projects.

As an opposition MP, he has presented parliament with a proposed law to lower the voting age to 18 from 21, demanded that the government build 3mn houses and argued it should set up a $500mn youth entrepreneurship fund.

To pressure the government he also in September joined Mozambique’s state council, an influential presidential advisory body that includes all previous living presidents as well as the runner-up in the last election.

“Such is the lack of faith in Frelimo for so many that Mondlane’s brand of populism spread like wildfire,” said Piers Pigou, an independent analyst in Johannesburg. “Whether it provided a realistic alternative was beside the point. It was an alternative and, in essence, that was all that mattered.”

Mondlane has regularly bemoaned a cost-of-living crisis and soaring prices of market staples, arguing that Frelimo is artificially propping up the currency and causing the country to run out of dollars.

Years of suppressed inflation — currently running at 4 per cent — could eventually erupt into a crisis, compounded by a heavy debt burden from the country’s so-called tuna bonds scandal, he said.

“The day that Mozambique liberates the exchange rate and we know the true inflation rate, we will see scenarios close to Zimbabwe,” said Mondlane, drawing a parallel to a country notorious for years of hyperinflation. Mozambique has “a fake exchange rate [that] the government is manipulating because they want to give the impression of stability”.

Although Mozambique does not officially have a peg to the dollar, the metical has been de facto kept at about 64 to the dollar for almost five years through central bank control of the currency market.

The country is still repaying debts from the $2bn tuna bond scandal in 2013, in which officials arranged state-backed loans to fund hugely inflated and fraudulent maritime security projects and a state tuna fishing fleet.

Almost 90 per cent of government tax revenue is used to service debt and pay state workers’ salaries. The government carried out an exchange of domestic debt in 2025 that was “tantamount to default”, and payments on some bonds were delayed, S&P Global said in October.

President Chapo, who has denied that Mozambique has any shortage of foreign currency, is in talks with the IMF on a bailout.

In July, the country’s attorney-general charged Mondlane with five crimes — including instigating and inciting terrorism, which carries a sentence of more than 20 years’ imprisonment and would bar him from running in the presidential elections in 2029.

A trial date has not yet been set — Mondlane has immunity through his position on the presidential advisory body — and analysts say it could reignite protests. Mondlane, who denies the allegations, said he has “a clear conscience”.

Flanked by two heavily armed bodyguards dressed in black, Mondlane said he is less fearful for his safety now, despite police firing on his convoy as he drove to an anti-government rally earlier in 2025. “It’s not as bad as before,” he said.

“You don’t need to have a gun in your hand to change Mozambique,” he added. “You need brains. You need ideas. You need a plan.”

Additional reporting by Joseph Cotterill in London