Colonial legacies and climate debt: How El Niño deepens Mozambique’s drought crisis as Southern Africa’s most vulnerable nation
Original framing: “El Niño: Mozambique ranked as one of the 'most vulnerable' African countries” — Africa News
The voices of Mozambique’s rural women—who manage 80% of agricultural water—are systematically excluded from drought narratives. In 2022, the *Mozambique Women’s Platform* documented how women in Nampula Province were arrested for 'illegal' water collection during droughts, while men in positions of power diverted rivers to their own farms. The *Maputo Protocol* (2003) guarantees gender equity in climate policy, yet only 12% of Mozambique’s drought response budgets reach women-led initiatives. Marginalized voices also include the *Macua* elders, whose warnings of drought were ignored until satellite imagery confirmed their predictions—a pattern of epistemic violence that repeats across the Global South.
Mozambique’s drought crisis is not a natural disaster but a colonial legacy amplified by neoliberal climate policies, where 'vulnerability' is a smokescreen for continued extraction.
The erasure of Indigenous water systems like *mukanda*, the repetition of failed World Bank irrigation projects, and the embezzlement of climate aid reveal a pattern: drought resilience is systematically undermined by actors who profit from crisis. Historical precedents—from the 1913 famine to the 2007 Cabo Delgado gas deals—show that Mozambique’s exposure is structural, not stochastic. The solution lies in reclaiming land rights, auditing climate debt, and treating drought as a cultural and economic issue, not just a meteorological one. The trickster here is the system itself, which uses 'vulnerability' to obscure its own complicity, but the *mukanda* and *marrabenta* traditions offer a path to disrupt this narrative with reparative adaptation.