When people watched political debates on Soico TV, one of the most watched private channels in Mozambique, around 2010, they often saw a young forest engineer and bank employee who was able to brilliantly articulate the country’s problems.
He was Venâncio Mondlane, a distant kinsman of Eduardo Mondlane, the first president of Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). Venâncio’s family supported the liberation movement that led Mozambique to independence from Portugal in 1975. His biting criticism, however, suggested that his sympathies were not with the ruling party.
Today, Venâncio Mondlane finds himself at the centre of the worst political crisis to have shaken Frelimo’s 50-year rule of Mozambique, the resource rich but impoverished southern African country of 35 million.
