via Filipe Nyusi: Biographical details The Zimbabwean 15 January 2015
Filipe Jacinto Nyusi, invested as President of Mozambique on Thursday, marks a break with the past.
Unlike his three predecessors – Samora Machel, Joaquim Chissano and Armando Guebuza – he is not a veteran of the war for Mozambican independence from Portuguese colonial rule. He is from a younger generation, and his formative experiences are post-independence.
Nyusi was born on 9 February 1959, in the village of Namau, in Mueda district, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado. His parents, Jacinto Nyusi Chimela and Angelina Daima, were peasants, and both joined the liberation struggle waged by the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo).
When the independence war broke out, in 1964, the Mueda plateau was an area of intense conflict between Frelimo and the colonial army. Like many other Mueda children, Filipe Nyusi became a refugee in Tanzania.
Here he completed his primary studies at the Frelimo Education Centre in Tunduru. At the age of 14, in 1973, he joined Frelimo. He underwent politico-military training at Nachingwea, Frelimo’s main rear base in Tanzania, but saw no combat.
From 1976 to 1980, he attended the Frelimo secondary school at Mariri in Cabo Delgado. He then moved to the central city of Beira to conclude his pre-university education at the Samora Machel Secondary School.
In 1990, he took the Mechanical Engineering course at the Vaaz Military Academy at Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia. He took a postgraduate degree in Senior Management in 1999, at Manchester University in Britain.
Nyusi’s professional experience is as a worker and then a manager in Mozambique’s publicly owned rail and port company, CFM.
From 1992-1993 he was a worker and then deputy head of the CFM general workshops in Nampula. In 1993 he was promoted to railway director of the northern division of CFM (CFM-Norte), and in 1995 to Managing Director of CFM-Norte, a post he held until 2007.
He was then transferred to Maputo where he joined the Board of Directors of CFM, as the director responsible for business operations.
But in 2008, Guebuza appointed him as Minister of Defence, a job to which he was reappointed in 2010, after Guebuza had won a second term of office in the 2009 general elections.
Nyusi was elected to the Frelimo Central Committee at the Party’s tenth congress, held in the northern city of Pemba in September 2012.
Thus Nyusi had been a member of the Frelimo leadership for less than two years, when he was proposed as the party’s candidate for the 2014 presidential election. At the Frelimo Central Committee meeting held in February-March 2014 to decide the candidate, five names were put forward. Nyusi won by a comfortable majority, although his nearest rival, former Prime Minister Luisa Diogo, forced the voting into a second round.
In the election, held on 15 October, Nyusi won with 57 per cent of the votes. The results, as validated on 30 December by the Constitutional Council, Mozambique’s highest body in matters of constitutional and electoral law, were as follows:
Filipe Nyusi (Frelimo) 2,803,536 (57.00 per cent) Afonso Dhlakama (Renamo) 1,800,448 (36.60 per cent) Daviz Simango (MDM) 314,759 (6.40 per cent).
In his personal life, Nyusi is married to Isaura Ferrão Nyusi, and they have four children.
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