50 Meticais

Mozambique's 1994 coinage came just two years after the Rome General Peace Accords ended a sixteen-year civil war between FRELIMO and RENAMO — a conflict that had effectively destroyed the country's formal economy and rendered most coinage irrelevant to daily transactions. The switch to nickel clad steel for this issue reflects how severely foreign exchange reserves had been depleted; the country simply could not afford the alloy costs of earlier compositions.