Mozambique’s faded hotel squatters hope for change after polls
Al Jazeera
Around 4,000 people squatting at a once-luxurious hotel are hoping for a better life.
In the sprawling slum of the once-glorious Grande Hotel in Mozambique’s Beira city, around 4,000 people living in squalor hope this month’s election will bring change.
Most of the scattered election posters on the blackened walls of the gutted beachfront building call for votes for the long-ruling socialist Frelimo party for the polls that took place last week.
A few back the opposition centre-right Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), which has controlled the Beira municipality for the past 20 years.
Results are due later this month and expected to keep Frelimo in charge of the impoverished southern African nation, which it has governed since the end of Portuguese rule half a century ago.
The hotel, with sweeping views of the Indian Ocean, mirrors the desperation of Mozambique, where around 75 percent of the 33 million people live in poverty and the wounds of a 16-year civil war are still raw.
