Society and human rights in Mozambique

  Josué Bila (uhurubila@gmail.com) Araçatuba, 15 February 2009 If official statistics are to be believed, half of Mozambique's population is mired in social deprivation below the poverty line. Under these conditions, it is difficult, but not impossible, to talk about the defense of prisoners' rights. Probable questions and reasons for this difficulty are often raised when discussing prisoners' rights by the state, prison authorities, the media and citizens, individually or collectively. Before I get to the heart of the matter, let me raise four of these probable questions and reasons: 1) How can the Mozambican state guarantee the rights of prisoners, while its human, material and financial resources are (seen as) limited to materialize the human rights of the population in general? 2) Why and how can the state maintain a doctor or nutritional security in a prison unit with 800 inmates, if in a locality of at least 150,000 inhabitants it is incapable of maintaining m...

Josué Bila (uhurubila@gmail.com) As a result of the political crisis sparked by the so-called mega-fraudulent 2024 elections, there is a social wave, which seems to me to be popularizing these days when the people believe they are in power, of discrediting academics and intellectuals for allegedly being useless in their assumptions and propositions. Academics and intellectuals are also discredited for their alleged ‘stomach alliance’ with the party in power. I agree to a certain extent. Despite these accusations against Mozambican academics and intellectuals, with this text, I intend to present another multidimensional platform for observing Mozambican thinkers. What I still haven't seen on the public assessment platform (mainly social media) is: who is an academic or intellectual? Why is it immediately assumed that ‘every’ academic is an intellectual? Who is an intellectual, from which schools of thought or from which social realities? Do the academics evaluated so far (in the s...

Josué Bila ( uhurubila@gmail.com ) All societies have political elites who are responsible for national policies at all levels, which is why a society or state is also a product and mirror of the decisions of its elites or people invested with power. In this text, I argue that our elites are a reproduction of the Portuguese colonial system and, unfortunately, they haven't let go of the memories of colonial violence and the resulting inequalities. Colonial policy created segregations between society, where the Portuguese were first class citizens; followed by the so-called assimilated group (they could read and write Portuguese and reproduced European culture and citizenship and, in many cases, despised African traditions) and the indigenous, who had not been integrated into European culture and citizenship and, consequently, preserved African culture. Thus, since Independence in 1975, the ruling party elites have continued to reproduce the structure of social inequalities, where ...

  Josué Bila (uhurubila@gmail.com) Text published on 18 April 2009. But, because of the post-election violence in Mozambique (since October 2024), the text remains current. The opened institutionalization of human rights in Mozambique in 1990 transformed the African country into a stage for debate on individual rights and freedoms, even though this discussion was fragmented and fragmented, due to the new experience and limited knowledge of most authorities and agents of the state and civil society. In this way, this fragmented discussion meant that the human rights catalogue was largely linked to the police, victims of police abuse, prisons and courts, and not seen as a public policy issue. To begin exercising my right to opinion, I pose the following questions: 1 - Who has the courage to point out that the recent defenseless deaths of 12 inmates by asphyxiation in Mozambican police cells in Nampula is the result of a lack of public policies (in the Administration of Justic...

  Josué Bila  (uhurubila@gmail.com)  The latest Mozambican elections are perhaps exposing the final stages of the nakedness of FRELIMO's political elites, as they are politically out of touch with social reality, which is why both those elites and their hand-kissers have found themselves in the season of public vituperation. It's obvious that the unstoppable demonstrations underway are a display of the ingloriousness of the ruling FRELIMO party, whose people's museum preserves the memory of the crushing of human dignity and gross violations of human rights - physical and moral murders, operation production, pejorative adjectives towards anyone or groups that think differently, persecution and threats, excessive partisanship of the state, dilapidation of the economy, social anorexia by blocking opportunities for all and the veiled demonization of liberal democracy. How is it that, in almost 50 years, young people who won national independence from Portugal in 1975 can ...