Mozambique’s election: Who’s contesting and what’s at stake?

Wednesday’s polls are expected to usher a younger president into power for the first time since independence in 1975.

Mozambicans are heading to the polls to vote in elections that could, for the first time, usher in a president born after the country’s independence from Portuguese colonisers in 1975.

Some 17 million of the country’s population of 32 million are eligible to vote in the coastal, resource-rich Southern African country on Wednesday. Parliamentary and provincial elections in the 11 provinces will be held simultaneously.

President Filipe Nyusi, 65, of the governing Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) party, will step down after eight years in office.

He could be the last of Frelimo’s pro-independence fighters-turned-presidents who were at the front lines of the brutal liberation war that saw thousands of Mozambicans killed.

Nyusi’s presidency is stained by a mega “tuna bond” corruption scandal (2013-2016) that saw high-level Frelimo members in government jailed – including a former finance minister convicted in the United States in August. Several politicians involved were found to have accepted bribes to arrange secret loan guarantees for government-controlled fishing companies.