Moz unrest shows the power of text messaging

MAPUTO – Deadly protests that paralysed Mozambique’s capital last week were spurred by a text message that went viral on Maputo’s cell phones, signalling the power of new technology in the hands of the poor.

It is difficult to find a mobile phone user who did not get the anonymous SMS message presaging the three days of violence which left 13 dead and about 400 wounded as police clashed with people protesting sharp increases in the cost of living.

The message, and the ensuing unrest, shows the new organisational power cell phones have brought to the poor in a country where 65 per cent of the population lives in poverty but exercises little political clout.

“There have been protests before, but they were never organised by SMS,” said Hares Serafim Mulango, an 18-year-old high school student from Mafalala.

“SMS is easier, because with SMS they tell you about situations far away from you.”

Organising formal protests is difficult in Mozambique, where getting a permit to march is a time-intensive bureaucratic procedure.

The explosion of cell phones has given the poor access to a political platform unavailable to them before.

“This technology is a new way of giving a voice, of giving power, of giving a means of expression that poor people themselves don’t have,” Joao Pereira, director of the Mozambican Civil Society Support Mechanism, told AFP.

“That group is never represented. That group is made up of the people who vote the least,” he said.

Only about a quarter of Mozambique’s 20 million people have cell phones, but that’s twice as many people as have access to electricity, and the number has been growing by about 50 per cent a year since 2004, according to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.

Pereira said cell phone technology is giving the poor a voice in politics in a country with a weak opposition, and where media are dominated by the state-owned newspaper and television station.

“It’s an instrument of empowerment. It’s a way of increasing the participation of the most marginalised parts of this society in the democratic system,” he said. – Nampa-AFP

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