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Paper short abstract

A case study of Mozambique, a Gen Z country, showing how hardly credible behaviour by the IMF and the World Bank imposed austerity, an oligarch state, and a resource curse. Mozambique has been recolonised and impoverished. Local people are impoverised, and Gen Z is in the streets.

Paper long abstract

Mozambique saw major demonstrations from October 2024 to March 2025 in which police shot and killed 350 protesters; one social media broadcaster was killed live on air. Poverty, inequality and corruption are increasing; the 2023 and 2024 elections were manifestly fraudulent. Gas, rubies and graphite have not created prosperity, and instead turned Cabo Delgado province into a resource curse with a civil war that has been going on there since 2017.

Youth see no future for themselves at the same time that they see their leaders becoming ever wealthier, so they blame their own local elites. But these young people have been harshly affected by post-cold-war neoliberal and free market economic changes. Mozambique was pushed into its Gen Z crisis by the IMF and World Bank, donors, the G7 group of capitalist industrialised countries, and global corporations. They imposed the same "shock therapy" that was imposed on the USSR to force the political elite to use their power to corruptly take control of banks, mines and businesses. They are the "oligarchs" who became wealthy by making links with multinational companies, which exploited the markets and resources. It was not a greedy elite but external pressure that corrupted government, but that elite has grown and is the now the active partner of recolonisation.