Cyclone Chido killed at least 94 people in Mozambique in its deadly rampage through the Indian Ocean last week, the country’s disaster management agency said yesterday, raising a previous death toll of 76.
The cyclone, which devastated the French island territory of Mayotte before hitting the African mainland, also destroyed 110,000 homes in Mozambique, officials said.
It comes as the southern African nation reels from a deadly post-election crisis pitting the party in power since Mozambique’s independence from Portugal against an opposition crying foul over alleged electoral fraud.
After making landfall the storm ravaged the northern province of Cabo Delgado with gusts of around 260 kilometres (160 miles) per hour, pelting it with 250 millimetres (10 inches) of rain in a day.
That part of northern Mozambique is both regularly ravaged by tropical storms and wrestling with unrest from a long-running religious insurgency.
More than 500,000 of the 620,000 Mozambicans affected by the storm — which experts say was made more intense by human-driven climate change — are concentrated in Cabo Delgado.
In the hard-hit Mecufi district a mosque had its roof stripped by the gale, as seen in images taken by Unicef. The ruling Frelimo party’s presidential candidate Daniel Chapo — whose win at the ballot box in October has been denounced by the opposition as fraudulent — visited the affected areas yesterday.
At least 130 people have been killed in protests against Chapo’s victory in an election that international observers say was marred by irregularities, according to Plataforma Decide. That local civil society group’s figures have been cited by Amnesty International.
A recent photo shows a drone view of destroyed houses and buildings following cyclone Chido in Pemba, Mozambique.
