Why a brave man’s murder made waves

Carlos Cardoso exposed corruption and it cost him his life. The conviction of his killers is a victory for freedom

The judge called the murder “the worst ever crime in Mozambican history”. Allow him the hyperbole, for Carlos Cardoso’s death, and the sensational trial that followed it, gripped the nation.
Cardoso, Mozambique’s leading investigative journalist, was not an easy man to intimidate. So when, three years ago, he realised that the perpetrators of the most outrageous bank fraud the country had seen were likely to escape justice, he wouldn’t let the matter drop. He targeted the key suspects and the public officials with whom he believed they had conspired.This tenacity was to cost him his life. On November 22, 2000, two men with AK-47s forced his car to stop in a Maputo street and opened fire. Cardoso, 49, died instantly. His driver survived his head injuries.

Mozambican civil society and writers worldwide were shocked by the murder. A petition signed by, among others, the writers Günter Grass, Noam Chomsky and John Pilger, was printed in the Maputo newspaper Notícias under the headline: “Who Killed Carlos Cardoso?” This was not the effect Cardoso’s killers had intended. Reporters Sans Frontières and the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to Government ministers querying the limits of press freedom in Mozambique. This international furore was embarrassing to a government which, in 1991, had not only sanctioned one of the most liberal press laws in Africa, but also, to its credit, largely honoured them and refrained from state intervention in the country’s media.

But it took Nina Berg – Cardoso’s partner and the mother of his two children – and her allies two years of dogged persistence before six men were brought to trial on November 18 last year. With no courtroom big enough, a marquee for 400 people was erected in Maputo’s top-security prison. The judge, Augusto Paulino, initially banned live broadcasts, but relented. For 27 days the nation was transfixed. As Berg’s lawyer said, the revelations of the trial were “the ultimate investigative reportage of Cardoso’s career”. The farrago of greed that emerged in court would have had a pantomime verve had it not been for the tragic ending.

In 1996, members of the Abdul Satar family opened accounts in a branch of the Commercial Bank of Mozambique (BCM). With the authorisation of the bank manager, Vicente Ramaya, their worthless cheques were exchanged for cash. In less than six months, they withdrew 144 billion metacais, which were changed into $14 million (£8.5 million) through their own foreign exchange bureaux, Unicambios. Then they began to buy luxury cars, houses and shops.

Momade Assife Abdul Satar and his brother, Ayob, were arrested with Ramaya not long after the fraud came to light. They were soon released pending a so-called further investigation, which never took place because they had allegedly bribed members of the public prosecution office. This enraged Cardoso, as did the fact that the Mozambican Government was forced to repay BCM the missing money.

At the time of his death, Cardoso was the editor of a faxed daily business news-sheet called Metical. It was through Metical that he began to harry the Government about the losses of millions of dollars from Mozambique’s banks including the BCM fraud, and the Abdul Satar family and their businesses. And he persisted in querying the Attorney-General’s role in the affair. When, in July 2000, President Chissano sacked the entire public prosecution office and appointed a new Attorney-General, the ringleaders of the BCM fraud had reason to worry. They had believed, as Berg put it, “that they controlled Maputo”.

In 1999 a lawyer for BCM, who was trying to indict the Abdul Satar brothers and Ramaya, was shot at in his car in Maputo. Even Judge Paulino felt under threat when, just before the trial, neighbours reported that six armed men were asking questions about his routine. From then on police guarded his home. The tension was also heightened when a young economist, António Siba-Siba Macuá-cua, was murdered last year. He had been scrutinizing the losses of another Mozambican bank.

As the Cardoso trial progressed, the drama intensified: dozens of people were implicated in the fraud or the murder, including high-ranking BCM officials and Nyimpine Chissano, son of the President. He was forced to testify and to account for a number of blank cheques, which he purportedly signed, in Momade Assife’s possession (Chissano denies any wrongdoing). Despite the defendants’ vast wealth and Mozambique’s underpaid and ill-equipped public service, justice, this time, has prevailed. Last Friday, five of those responsible for Cardoso’s murder were given prison sentences of up to 24 years.

It would be naïve to see this trial as a turning point in Mozambique’s fight against corruption, but it has set in motion other investigations which the public prosecution office may now have to pursue. This, too, is Cardoso’s legacy. Mia Couto, a former journalist and now Mozambique’s most famous fiction writer, said the media in the early post-colonial years “helped build the backbone” of the country. Cardoso was instrumental in this.

In the words of Berg: “he was someone who didn’t believe that journalism was something objective. It was a tool to be used in the political struggle.” However you look at it, Cardoso was killed because he was the most steadfast journalist in the country.

First published in The Times, 2003