Just outside Nampula, in northern Mozambique, a huge granite dome overlooks the city, 500 feet high and a half-mile across. All along its southern flank, hundreds of men work in small groups, whittling away at the rock face with sledgehammers and picks. Smoke rises before dawn until well after dusk, as they stoke fires to heat the granite and use crowbars to prize free tombstone-sized slabs. Day by day, the mountain is carted away by the wheelbarrow-full. It’s backbreaking work that yields barely enough to live. Yet these informal quarries are nevertheless among the region’s largest employers. Certainly, more people have found work here than with Kenmare Resources, the Irish company that has sunk more than US$1 billion into mining titanium deposits along the nearby coast.

After its long civil war ended in 1992, Mozambique’s economy grew nearly as fast as China’s. Megaprojects like Kenmare’s mines helped propel one of the world’s poorest countries to a spot on The Economist’s list of the 10 fastest-growing economies. As the civil war wound down, the IMF and the World Bank prodded Mozambique’s Marxist leaders to streamline public spending with cuts to health and education and open the country up to foreign investment. “Mozambique has made the transition to peace, stability, and sustained economic growth,” reads the “About Mozambique” section of the USAID mission’s website, “providing an essential link between landlocked neighbors and the global marketplace.”

And yet, so much of the “success” touted in the West seems poised to unravel. In 2012, after two decades of peace, the leader of the Mozambican opposition returned to the bush with a ragtag group of former soldiers. A low-level guerilla war forced thousands of people to flee their homes, and spurred a string of assassinations of opposition politicians. A steep drop in commodity prices put major gas and coal projects on hold. And in 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that a group of ruling-party politicians had secretly secured US$2 billion in loans from European banks—equivalent to more than 10 percent of the country’s GDP. That news led the IMF and key Western governments to cut off support to Mozambique, sending the Mozambican currency on a downward spiral; it lost nearly half its value in less than a year.

More than 50 countries in sub-Saharan Africa gained independence in the 23 years before 1980. Now, half a century into the era of African independence, each of these nations is struggling to forge a new path beyond a shared history of colonialism, war, and underdevelopment, to shore up fragile institutions that have yet to supplant the power of the informal system. My new book, Go Tell the Crocodiles: Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique, gives an alternative history of Mozambique’s relative success, focusing on the yawning gap between its milestones and the lived reality of economics and politics of its 28 million citizens.

Ordinary Lives, Global Problems

To many ordinary Mozambicans, like the people I met in the course of reporting, the roots of these problems have been obvious for a long time. They told me that membership in the ruling party, Frelimo, seemed to be a pre-requisite for public sector jobs like teaching and nursing, and wondered how elections marred by fraudulent ballots and illegal campaigning could nevertheless be endorsed by international observers. They saw no reason to disbelieve rumors that Mozambique’s high officials took a piece of every megaproject they approved, and wondered why more wasn’t done to improve the nuts and bolts of the rural economy—roads, electricity, running water. They rallied to support Mozambique’s hapless opposition leader, despite his constant threats of violence, because his critiques of the status quo rang true.

Mozambique’s growth has been fueled largely by industrial projects like Kenmare’s mines, which are heavy on foreign capital, but light on jobs or contributions to the local economy. The single largest private sector project in Mozambique—responsible for nearly a third of exports—is an aluminum smelter that consumes nearly half the country’s electricity but employs just over 1,000 people. For every dollar Mozal earns the Mozambican government, its foreign backers earn $21. Subsistence farmers in Nampula province have had to make way for South African bananas and Brazilian soybeans, even as the productivity of Mozambique’s small farms has actually declined since the 1990s.

Everywhere in Mozambique, people have devised informal solutions to get by where development has failed: turning to the church for “spiritual cures” where modern healthcare is unavailable, or digging up rubies and tourmaline by hand after dark to avoid detection by the multinational companies that own Mozambique’s richest gem fields. In some cases, these DIY strategies work; in others, they fail completely.

A Day’s Pay: Making It in Mozambique

In rural areas where the cash economy is tethered to passing cars and buses, you’ll find merchants clustered near bad potholes and beside speedbumps—sales are better where traffic moves slowly. The roadside economy can be especially brutal, though: Regular stops draw scores of vendors holding plastic buckets of produce aloft towards open car windows, desperate to make a sale amid a crush of people all selling the very same thing—oranges, bananas, peanuts, or avocados. Sales opportunities come sporadically and prices tumble by the second. City-dwelling passengers roll down a window, demand the last, best offer for a chicken dangling by the legs, and rev their engines, threatening to leave without buying anything at all. Goats go for six or seven dollars, pineapples for a nickel or two.

No effort is spared to extract a day’s pay from the resources at hand. In the markets, cardboard boxes are flattened and rolled into tight cylinders, then bound with string to make lightweight stools. Blacksmiths repurpose discarded car radiators to make a more efficient bellows.

On the slopes of Mount Mabu, a mountain in northern Mozambique where British biologists have identified dozens of previously unknown species, I met a man who had just felled a tree well over a hundred feet tall, its trunk as large as the pylons that support a highway overpass. In two days, he had extracted several gallons of wild honey from a hive high in the canopy, enough to fill a jerrycan and make the long trip to town by bicycle. The payoff would be $40. How much, I wondered, would the tree be worth if only he had a means to mill the timber and sell that too? What else could the man have done with a long ladder or a climbing rope?

Go Tell the Crocodiles explores the lives of people in Mozambique and uncovers broader challenges to 21st century development shared by countries across sub-Saharan Africa.

For example, 80 percent of Mozambicans make a living from agriculture, yet none of the country’s large industrial projects has required investors to create infrastructure that would improve production or access to markets for most farmers. The new railway that brings Mozambican coal to port doesn’t have excess capacity to transport local produce. A Norwegian company’s plans to use Mozambican natural gas to make fertilizer include no provisions to produce fertilizer for the local market. None of the large agribusiness projects in Mozambique have made major investments in irrigation for small family farms. 

The agendas of countries that provide foreign aid to Mozambique have too often been cleaved in two. While development agencies fund health and education initiatives and urge more support for vulnerable groups, the World Bank and the IMF have pushed Mozambique toward industrial projects where foreign corporations extract the lion’s share of the profits. Both those lenders and their counterparts in Western governments should use their leverage to help Mozambique negotiate better deals with the private sector. And they should look more aggressively for ways new projects can support economic development for ordinary Mozambicans.