20101217
allAfrica.com

The recent commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the assassination of Mozambique's best known investigative journalist, Carlos Cardoso, was held at the same place, and at the same time of day, as the attack happened.

Cardoso was killed on a downtown Maputo street while driving home to his family from the offices of the independent publication he founded, "Metical." He had been writing about alleged massive fraud at Mozambique's largest bank at the time.

Bestselling Swedish author Henning Mankell, who has lived part-time in Mozambique and worked with a Maputo theatre group, Teatro Avenida, since 1986, has helped focus attention on Cardoso's death.

"When Carlos was killed, I was angry and sad and I immediately decided that we should do a play about him and the need of investigating journalists in a democracy," he said in an interview.

He called his play "The Silence."

"The title has two meanings," he said. "Silence is never anything that moves a society forward and there was too much silence surrounding the murder of Carlos. Until it was made clear to the police and the politicians that we would never accept that his case was not solved – and today his murderers are rotting in jail!"

For Cardoso family lawyer Lucinda Cruz, the conviction and sentencing of Cardoso's killers "shows that justice can and has triumphed in Mozambique."

But a Mozambican journalist who worked with Cardoso at "Metical" and covered the trials that convicted the hitmen and those who ordered his assassination, is more cynical.

"There have been more than a dozen other murders related to corruption," said Maria de Lourdes Torcato, citing this year's killings of a customs officer and a game reserve director investigating illegal elephant hunting with weapons from suspicious sources.

One of those who attended the memorial service for Cardoso was the widow of banker Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, murdered a year after Cardoso while trying to recover bad debts from top government officials and members of the ruling Frelimo party.

Among other suspects in Cardoso's assassination were Nyimpine Chissano, the son of the former Mozambican president, Joaquim Chissano, and an associate. Both died of natural causes shortly before their long-awaited trial.

"I don't think one needs to support the tendency that the party must have been involved," commented Paul Fauvet, head of the Mozambican news agency AIM's English service and co-author (with Marcelo Mosse) of the biography, "Carlos Cardoso: Telling the Truth in Mozambique."

"Those convicted had connections to Frelimo but they were not running it," he said.

Jeremy Grest of the University of KwaZulu Natal's School of Politics believes the government or ruling party's alleged involvement in the assassination is not the central issue. He says what needs to be condemned is a "wild west accumulation process, with state enterprises being sold off, and this elite launching into a new accumulation path based on using its political leverage for personal gain from state resources."

Canadian political economist and longtime Mozambique expert John Saul believes Frelimo's "corruption by power and privilege" offers a lesson for neighbouring South Africa.

"The South African echo of Carlos's trajectory is clear," said Saul. "It is the need to expose the negative implications of corporate greed and personal aggrandizement on the part of political and governmental elites."

How to expose these trends, in Mozambique and South Africa?

Through the kind of investigative journalism that Cardoso engaged in, according to Fernando Goncalves, editor of "Savana," an independent publication launched in the era when Cardoso was part of the journalist cooperative, Mediacoop.

"The best way of exposing corruption, which I am sure Cardoso would be doing if he were alive, is to tackle it from the perspective of the conflict of interest," said Goncalves.

"A good investigative journalist would look at every tender and contract with the government and highlight the fact that top government and party officials have a hand in everything – so there is no way they can be independent regulators," he said.

For journalist Torcato there is reason to take heart at the outcomes of such investigations, in the media and in the courts: "There have been more trials of corruption cases in public accounting in the past two years than in the past 35 years of independence," she said.

Milton Machel, of the country's Centre for Public Integrity, cautions that more trials are not the ultimate goal. "To satisfy us that the system is now working and holding those involved in corruption accountable, we need to monitor what comes out of such trials," cautions Machel, the centre's communications coordinator (and a relative of Mozambique's first president, Samora Machel).

"That's the main challenge: to ensure that finally our justice system is fast-tracking these cases and that the National Prosecuting Authority continues to fight corruption vigorously, in a way that it will at some point discourage the malpractices in the public and private sectors so that the corruption decreases here in Mozambique," he said. "That's what we hope."

Julie Frederikse is a writer and filmmaker based in Durban who reported on southern Africa with Carlos Cardoso.