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Since its emergence from a brutal, 17-year civil war, Mozambique’s process of political reform has faced a number of challenges. The first has been to empower ordinary Mozambicans by allowing them to participate in a democratic system and enabling them to voice their demands to the state and hold it accountable. The second has been to rebuild a state with the capacity to respond to citizen demands effectively. And given the long history of violent division, a third challenge has been to build a state that enjoys broad legitimacy – a legitimacy that spans the bitter partisan divides of the past, enabling the formation of a strong, authoritative state with the ability to enforce the rule of law, but also the discipline to rule through transparent procedures. Perhaps the best evidence by which to judge the success of the process of political reform are the opinions of ordinary Mozambicans. Rather than looking to expert judgments or to measures of formal constitutional rights, we believe that the views of ordinary citizens – as the ultimate consumers of what democratic governments supply – can offer perhaps the most conclusive assessment of the quality of governance. What do they say? Through its partner in Mozambique, the Public Opinion Service of the Centre for Population Studies at the University of Eduardo Mondlane, the Afrobarometer surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1425 Mozambicans citizens, aged 18 years and older, using a multi-stage, area-stratified, clustered sample designed by the National Institute for Statistics. The survey was carried out between August and October 2002 in all 10 provinces of the Republic of Mozambique. At a confidence level of 95 percent, a sample of this size allows a confidence interval, or margin of error, of plus or minus 2.5 percent. This means that, had we interviewed every Mozambican, 19 times out of 20 the results would differ from those of this survey by no more than 2.5 percent. The evidence from this survey suggests that although Mozambique is plagued by what appear to be insurmountable problems, in general the country appears to be on the right path as an emerging democracy. While the society faces vast challenges of building human and social capital to empower citizens further and increase the capacity of the state, the democratization that has occurred since Mozambique opened its political space has gone a long way in propelling democracy forward.