country: WESTERN SAHARA.

The Polisario Front’s high-level engagement in Maputo — where its Foreign Affairs and African Affairs delegation met with Mozambique’s President to deliver an official message from Sahrawi leadership and brief Mozambican authorities on recent diplomatic developments — is a deliberate act of continental diplomacy whose logic is rooted in a fundamental claim: that Western Sahara remains an unresolved question of decolonisation, and that Africa’s collective position on that question carries both moral authority and practical political weight in the international forums where the dispute’s future will ultimately be determined. Mozambique’s long-standing support for the Sahrawi people’s right to self-determination — rooted in its own history of anti-colonial struggle and its consistent engagement with Pan-African solidarity frameworks — makes it a natural interlocutor for a movement whose primary diplomatic theatre remains the African continent.

The substance of the Maputo engagement — the Polisario’s briefing on diplomatic mobilisation at continental and international levels, and Mozambique’s reiteration of support within African diplomatic platforms — reflects a strategic understanding that the Western Sahara question cannot be resolved through bilateral diplomacy alone but requires sustained multilateral pressure across the African Union, the United Nations, and the bilateral relationships of the states whose positions collectively shape the international community’s approach to the dispute. The Polisario’s diplomatic outreach is therefore not ceremonial; it is the operational maintenance of a coalition whose persistence is itself a form of political pressure, signalling to Morocco and to the international community that African solidarity on the question of Sahrawi self-determination remains active, organised, and capable of sustained engagement.

Western Sahara’s persistence as a fault line in African diplomacy — where questions of sovereignty, recognition, territorial integrity, and historical justice intersect with contemporary alliance politics — reflects the unresolved tension at the heart of the post-colonial African state system between the principle of territorial integrity inherited from colonial borders and the principle of self-determination whose application the Organisation of African Unity originally endorsed for Western Sahara. The Polisario’s continued engagement with African solidarity networks, decades after the formal decolonisation moment that was supposed to resolve such questions, is a reminder that the promises of the post-colonial moment were not uniformly kept — and that the continental institutions established to protect those promises remain accountable to the populations whose legitimate claims they have yet to fully honour.

PHOTO SOURCE: SAHARA PRESS SERVICE (SPS).