Armando Guebuza
Armando Guebuza was president of Mozambique from 2005 to 2015, the Frelimo veteran and the richest man in the country, who had been the interior minister of 1975 who gave the Portuguese twenty-four hours and twenty kilos to leave, the minister who ran Operation Production of 1983 that deported the cities' unemployed to the north, the party's chief negotiator of the Rome peace accord of 1992 with Renamo, and its secretary-general. His ten years were the boom of the coal at Tete, the gas found off Cabo Delgado in 2010 that was to be the largest in Africa, the growth of seven per cent a year that made Mozambique the donors' showcase. There were the bridges and roads built by China and Portugal, the food riots of 2008 and 2010 in Maputo over bread and bus fares, in which the police shot a dozen. There was the return of Renamo's leader Dhlakama to the bush in 2013 and the skirmishes that followed until the ceasefire before the election of 2014. There were the hidden debts, the two billion dollars borrowed in secret in 2013-14 through three state companies for a tuna fleet and coastal patrol boats, with the parliament not told and the donors lied to. They came out in 2016, brought the IMF's suspension, the currency's collapse and a decade of prosecutions in Maputo, London and New York. They put his son Ndambi in prison for twelve years in 2022 for his part. He was born in Murrupula in Nampula in 1943, the son of a nurse, was a student leader in Lourenço Marques, joined Frelimo in Tanzania in 1963 and was its political commissar in the war. After independence he held the interior, defence and transport ministries and was the party's man for whatever was hard. The businesses he and his family acquired in the privatisations of the 1990s, in banking, ports, construction and beer, were the fortune. He chose Nyusi as his successor in 2014 and was pushed out of the party's presidency by him in 2015. He has spent the years since in Maputo defending the debts as a matter of national security, which the courts have not accepted and the party has not pursued.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mozambican
- Roles: president, politician
