Filipe Nyusi

Filipe Jacinto Nyusi (Portuguese pronunciation: [fiˈlipɨ ʒɐˈsĩtu ˈɲusi]; born 9 February 1959) is a Mozambican politician serving since 2015 as the fourth President of Mozambique. He is the current leader of FRELIMO, the party that has governed Mozambique since its independence from Portugal in 1975. Additionally, he has served as the Chairman of the Southern African Development Community since August 2020. During his time in office, President Nyusi has promoted peace and security, and signed multiple agreements with the main opposition parties, RENAMO, to bring a definitive and lasting peace to Mozambique.

Nyusi served as the Minister of Defense from 2008 to 2014 under Armando Guebuza. He won the 2014 and 2019 Mozambican presidential elections as the candidate of FRELIMO. Despite allegations of irregularities the President of the National Election Commission stated that "the elections were free, fair and transparent", with the Constitutional Count verifying the result on 23 December 2019. However, according to the European Union Election Observation Mission in Mozambique, Commonwealth Observer Group, and the U.S. Embassy in Mozambique, the 2019 election was characterized by instances of fraud, intimidation, and the murders of opposition leaders and election observers. The President of the National Election Commission acknowledged that the 2019 elections were marked by irregularities, stating that "that is why when [the National Election Commission] announced the results, nobody heard [the National Election Commission] saying that the elections were free, fair and transparent."

During his time in office from 2015 to 2018, the poverty reduction trend observed between 2009–11 and 2015 reversed direction; the number of multidimensionally poor people increased from about 21.3 to about 22.2 million people from 2015 to 2018, with the extra million poor people mainly located in rural areas of the central provinces.

Since March 2015, at least 10 high-profile figures have been killed in Mozambique. These include leaders of opposition parties, journalists, and academics. Previously, no similarly defined high-profile leaders of opposition parties and academics were reported killed since the Peace Accord of 1992 between RENAMO and FRELIMO. Nyusi has also been accused of abuse of power; for example, some 90,000 school desks publicly delivered by Nyusi in September 2018 were manufactured by a company 50% owned by his daughter. Furthermore, court documents filed by Jean Boustani in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in 2019 and by Iskandar Safa in The High Court of Justice in London in 2021 alleged that Nyusi received up to 2 million dollars in bribes in 2014 in connection with illegal loans (also known as "hidden debts"), which caused an economic crisis in Mozambique when he was the Minister of Defense and/or afterward.

Nyusi's time in office has been marked by the escalation of the war in Mozambique's central and northern regions. The FRELIMO government has been described as authoritarian by The Economist Intelligence Unit, Monjane et al., and Manning et al.