Filipe Nyusi
Filipe Nyusi was president of Mozambique from 2015 to 2025, the railway engineer and defence minister whom Guebuza chose and who then removed Guebuza from the party, the first president from the north. His ten years were the hidden debts he inherited and the collapse they caused in 2016. There was the insurgency in Cabo Delgado that began with an attack on a police station in Mocímboa da Praia in October 2017 and grew into an Islamic State affiliate that took the town of Palma in March 2021, killed thousands, displaced a million and stopped TotalEnergies' twenty-billion-dollar gas project, which Rwandan troops and a southern African force then fought back to the villages. There were the cyclones Idai and Kenneth of 2019 that killed six hundred and flooded Beira, the peace agreement of August 2019 with Renamo that disarmed its last fighters, and the pandemic. There was the election of October 2024 in which his party's candidate Chapo was declared the winner with seventy-one per cent and the opposition's Venâncio Mondlane, with a count of his own, called the country into the streets for three months in which the police killed some three hundred, the deadliest protests since independence, until Nyusi handed over in January 2025 to Chapo with the capital under guard. He was born in Namau in Cabo Delgado in 1959, the son of Frelimo guerrillas, studied mechanical engineering at Eduardo Mondlane University and in the Czech Republic and management at Victoria University in Manchester, ran the northern railways and ports company from 1995. He was Guebuza's defence minister from 2008, which put him in charge of the patrol boats the hidden loans bought. The growth that had been seven per cent fell to three and then to nothing. The debt was restructured with the bondholders in 2019 on terms that pledged the future gas. The gas itself, from the floating platform that Eni started in 2022, has begun to flow while the onshore projects wait for the insurgency to end. The country he left is one of the five poorest in the world with the largest gas reserves in Africa, which is the sentence every account of it ends with. He remains the party's president until 2026. Chapo governs in his shadow.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Mozambican
- Roles: president, engineer, politician
