Beyond Reform: Adjustment and Political Power in Contemporary Mozambique

Abstract

Faced with global depression and political readjustments in the late 1980s, all states in Africa have been trying to implement major reforms. For socialist régimes, however, the demands have been the more daunting since these changes have often directly threatened the ideology (and the aspirations) of creating a more egalitarian social order in the wake of colonial rule. Their states faced fundamental social, economic, and ideological transformations, as well as political reconstruction; what was required was no less than the replacement of a socialist with a capitalist market economy, and corresponding alterations in property relations that involved enterprises such as peasant holdings, small family firms, and co-operatives, as well as large-scale farms, factories, and plants under state control. These reforms not only affected the lives of ordinary people, but also reshaped the power and privileges of the government, party leaders, and others directly dependent upon the state.