Born in Inhambane, into a large family. His voracity as a reader is very old. As a boy, on the way to school, when he found a newspaper or magazine, he would read. that's how his passion for reading developed. in student life, his inclination was always in the area of letters.
He completed his basic education in commerce, at a time when there was, in the City of Inhambane, a literary movement called “xiphefo” and his affection for letters urged him to participate in that movement. He liked to read newspapers, magazines (he had a very special passion for the “Gazeta de Artes and letters of the magazine “tempo”) and evolved into the novel (Irving Wallace, Hemingway, Stendal, among others, were his favorite authors) and radio.
In the 90s, he began his journalistic career on the radio, as a sports reporter. We wanted to “dig” his relationship with the journalist Carlos Cardoso and he explained to us that “in 1992, with the advent of the peace accords, I came to Maputo and met carlos cardoso, at the time, editor of MediaFax. I introduced myself and with your approval I became a correspondent for this electronic publication in Inhambane. Under his guidance, I began to have a more critical editorial reading. in 1994, after the first multiparty general elections, I moved to Maputo. I started to be a reporter based in the capital and learned a lot from Cardoso in terms of ethics, deontology, investigation, transparency and this is directly linked to the origin of ciP. The teachings of carlos cardoso were crucial in the foundation of the CIP”
In terms of higher education, he had thought about studying law. However, someone “drag” him into the social sciences, an area unknown to him at the time. it was during the course of classes at the “Eduardo mondlane” university's Training and Research Unit in Social Sciences that he realized he was on the right path.
We urge you to talk about the origin of the CIP and tell us “that you cannot dissociate carlos cardoso from the formation of the CIP, at least in terms of inspiration for it to happen. in 2000 he is murdered. An opportunity came to me to go to Portugal, with a grant from Portuguese cooperation. I went to do a master's degree in African studies. There, my intention was to deepen the themes of corruption from an academic perspective and not as an investigative journalist that I already was. I discovered, in my college, Luís Sousa, a guru in the area, who I had already read before. I had to read a lot about governance, ethics, transparency and corruption by academics around the world. I built specialized knowledge.
In the land of luís Vaz de Camões, he managed to gather knowledge about development and corruption, areas that enabled him to create an organization when he returned to Pérola do Indico. His intention was to return and join the Mozambican Ethics. there was resistance and that organization collapsed. then decided to go forward with “the idea of creating a civil society organization aimed at anti-corruption: the Public Integrity Center (CIP). To be official, it had to have at least 10 people. My first guest was Adriano nuvunga, who at the time was a colleague at UFCS. Each one of us was given the mission to find 4 more people to complete the number and register the institution. Adriano had to leave for his master's, in Holland. I had to start from zero. I designed the strategic plan and the budget. with the help of Professor Luís de Brito we got the first $100,000 of Swiss cooperation for the first 10 months. However, six months later other donors came.
In the initial phase, the CIP interventions were based on the scientific analysis of topics related to anti-corruption and this had a great impact, because the donors themselves did not have much knowledge about this new area. CIP began to be an important source of information in talks between the Government and donors regarding budget support.
