Mozambique: Trouble at Home

Even as Mozambique steps up its efforts to train Rhodesian guerrillas and help them infiltrate and harass the white-ruled nation, it is itself slipping deeper into an economic and political morass. President Samora Machel's decision last month to close his border with Rhodesia and proclaim a "state of war" deprived landlocked Rhodesia of vital rail links to the sea, and is forcing it into a virtual siege economy. But the move will also cost Mozambique at least $50 million a year in Rhodesian transit and rail revenues and up to $30 million annually brought back by Mozambican workers in Rhodesia, which together account for about a quarter of the country's foreign-exchange earnings.

The country's new economic troubles pose a dilemma for Machel, who was already facing rising dissent at home over one of the harshest austerity programs ever imposed by an African government on its people. When Mozambique won its independence from Portugal last June, its future looked relatively bright compared with that of Lisbon's other African territories. Unlike Angola, which became engulfed in a civil war among three liberation movements, Mozambique had only one major force fighting for independence -- Frelimo (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). Frelimo leaders made seemingly sincere requests to whites to stay on and help build the new country.

Breakneck Pace. Unpersuaded, more than half of the 220,000 whites left before independence. As a result, Mozambique is almost without skilled and professional workers. There are now fewer than 1,000 trained administrators and only 15 medical doctors for a population of 8.5 million people. Machel, 42, a onetime medical orderly who led the struggle for independence and became the country's first President, set about at breakneck pace to convert Mozambique into what he calls "Africa's first Marxist state." All land was nationalized. The large colonial plantations, which supported more than half of the population, were organized into collective farms. But, reports one visitor, "nobody can agree on how they are to be run, so production from the land is at a virtual standstill. While the bureaucrats argue, nobody does any planting."

Food production is down by 75% in some areas. Bread, rice, milk and eggs are in short supply. Production of major cash crops like sugar and cotton is off at least 50%. Investment has been scared away, unemployment has soared, and the last remaining whites (who number fewer than 30,000) are scrambling to get out.

Thousands of people have been packed off to "reeducation centers," where Machel's brand of Marxism is taught with a heavy and sometimes brutal hand. Machel does not coddle even his own supporters. He has warned that many workers might have to toil for as long as three years without pay "for we are without funds to reward your labors." After independence, Frelimo soldiers were given the choice of leaving the service without pay for their years in the guerrilla movement or of staying in the service--also without pay. Says Machel: "We cannot tolerate a bourgeoisie in Mozambique, even a black one."

At least three opposition groups have since been created by bitter former followers of Machel. One Makonde tribesman from the north told TIME Nairobi Bureau Chief Lee Griggs, "I fought seven years with Samora in the bush. I believed in his vision of liberation and hard work. But now my family is worse off than when the Portuguese were there."

Rallying Round. For now, most Mozambicans seem to be concerned enough about the threat of war with Rhodesia to rally round Machel. Radio broadcasts carry frequent reports of villagers digging bomb shelters in preparation for an aerial attack from Rhodesia. Radio Mozambique has even taken to beaming a five-minute nightly commentary to its next-door neighbor. The announcer, a Scotsman named Iain Christie, has been christened "Lord Macduff" by scoffing listeners in Rhodesia for statements like "Enjoy your ill-gotten gains while you can, Rhodesians. In the new Zimbabwe [the African name for Rhodesia], your doom is sealed."

Yet Machel shows no signs of actually wanting a war, and with good reason. Though Moscow recently delivered two shiploads of armored cars, 122-mm. mobile rocket launchers and SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles, Machel's poorly trained 10,000-man army is ill-equipped to handle them.

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