The Minister of the Interior, Pascoal Ronda, said yesterday that young people are being manipulated and supplied with drugs to carry out acts of violence at demonstrations.

Speaking in Maputo, on the sidelines of the inauguration of electronic gates at Mavalane Airport, he said that the government's reaction to the protests has been proportional to "the patient's illness".

For Ronda, the escalation of protests in the country is taking on terrorist dimensions, as the Commander General of the Police of the Republic of Mozambique recently said.

"This is terrorism. When they say we want to reach Ponta VermelhaThis means the removal of democratically established bodies. This is serious. That's why the dosage of the measures has been commensurate with the patient's illness. There are people who have been manipulated. There are minors, for whom I feel sorry, who drink very strong alcohol first thing in the morning, which takes them out of their senses. They're smoking, they're injecting themselves, or they're using cannabis sativa to be used. I call it instrumentalization," he said, quoted by Rádio Moçambique.

Ronda believes that the "model" of demonstrations taking place in the country is the result of constitutional standards being breached.