This article begins by looking at the historical development of corruption in Mozambique, associating it with the breakdown of the party-state and the civil war. Following from this historical context, attention is paid to contemporary forms of corruption and their relationship to broader economic changes. It is argued that structural adjustment has created an unstable political economy in which social boundaries are unclear and/or in flux. Because of this general condition, the well placed and the desperate have elaborated strategies of corruption in order to enrich themselves or provide a basic standard of living, respectively. More specifically, the article looks at: the impact of rapid changes in the economy and an associated growth in an acquisitive and individualised social attitudes; the procedure of privatisation; the effects of budgetary austerity; and the effects of a massive increase in national/international flows of value. The article concludes by considering the political responses to the association of corruption with structural adjustment, most clearly embodied in the term cabritalismo -a conflation of the Portuguese for corruption and capitalism.