The annual report presented to parliament on Wednesday by the Attorney General Américo Letela will have reinforced a public perception that has become dominant in recent times, suggesting that there finally seems to be greater political will to fight organized crime and corruption.
The latest actions of the National Criminal Investigation Service (Sernic), resulting in the preventive detention of senior state officials accused of corruption crimes and other individuals allegedly involved in organized and transnational crime actions, including terrorism, money laundering and drug trafficking, feed this perception, itself the product of a long and widespread belief that these evils in Mozambique have become endemic, exceeding the state’s ability to impose itself and combat them with vigour they require.
This feeling of despair has also become more pronounced due to the evolution of the crime of kidnapping, which for more than a decade has become the single most viable industry in the country, so lucrative it is, in addition to its presumed association with a wave of murders that last year hit Sernic’s own family. Young officers belonging to this service working under the auspices of the Office of the Public Prosecutor had their promising lives cut short in the midst of a wave of murders carried out in broad daylight and in public places, which are believed to have been motivated by the need to protect the main beneficiaries of the kidnappings.
Highly visible actions are very good in drumming up public sentiment, but they do not always reflect substance, so that if they are not followed by other concrete actions that lead to fair trial of those accused, there is a great risk that the current mood will fade, replaced by the same scepticism as always.
The AG’s report made reasonably detailed reference to some more recent cases of alleged corruption, which are being processed at the level of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, namely those related to the National Institute of Social Security (INSS), the Mozambican Airlines (LAM), the Treasury, the Administrative Court of Maputo City and the Revenue Authority.
These are cases still under investigation, involving a total of 42 individuals, mostly civil servants and in preventive detention.
The AG recognizes that the consequences of corruption “go beyond the level of the criminal justice system, projecting itself on the economy, governance, social justice and citizens’ trust in institutions”.
And it is more than that. The fight against corruption is also the subject of a controversial public debate, and there is, in some quarters, the feeling that its fight is somewhat selective, touching only on peripheral actors, but leaving out the leaders of these criminal gangs. As in the business of drug trafficking and kidnappings, where the masterminds are always left out.
There is also the idea that the selective nature of this fight is related to the need to remove old actors and replace them with new ones linked to the new cycle of governance, in addition to the protectionism that has become evident when it comes to going deeper and seek to expose the ills of the system.
The omission in the AG’s report of any reference to the autonomous court case related to the hidden debts, occurring, as it does, at a time when the key figure in the biggest corruption scandal in living memory returns to the country, demonstrates in a crystal clear way the inherent limitations to which the long arm of justice is itself subject when it approaches certain sensibilities.
There will certainly be many people who want to believe that the current offensive against corruption and organized crime constitutes a new way of being and doing things in our public life, but others too, guided by a certain spirit of pragmatism, will prefer to maintain their doubts until proven otherwise.