Mozambique's Rome peace turns 34 — it held by turning an army into a party

The Rome agreement was less a handshake than a timetable for turning an army into a party: its protocols required both sides to canton their troops and new parties to be formed, and two years later Renamo held 37.8% of the vote — a defeat it could live inside. Applying our Scorecard's method to that window, Mozambique's electoral democracy score on V-Dem rose by 0.28 between 1992 and 1995 while the median African country's moved by 0.01 — the 94th percentile, the fourth-largest gain of 54 countries; over 2022–2025, the years since the Pretoria Agreement, Ethiopia's fell by 0.04 while the median barely moved, P25. The difference is not only in the signatures: in May 2025 Ethiopia's election board revoked the registration of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, the party that signed in Pretoria and now fights in an alliance seeking to overthrow Abiy Ahmed's government, and on 5 October a new parliament opens with Tigray's 38 seats empty. Rome is no fairy tale — Renamo kept enough men under arms to go back to war in 2013, and it took the Maputo accord of 2019 to end that — so the lesson cuts both ways: a party without disarmament did not hold, and disarmament without a party offers no road back at all. We said on 2 October that the 2018 peace with Eritrea was never built, only held; the real test for Pretoria, four weeks before its fourth anniversary, is whether anyone offers the TPLF what Rome offered Renamo — a ballot it can lose without losing everything.