RENAMO OPPOSED TO VEHICLE INSPECTIONS

Parliamentary deputies from Mozambique’s main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, on Thursday repeatedly demanded that the government scrap the compulsory inspection of vehicles, on the ground that it makes no sense to demand that vehicles are roadworthy when the roads themselves are in poor condition.Interior Minister Alberto Mondlane, defending the inspections, pointed out that the available statistics showed that 55 per cent of road accidents are due to human factors (such as speeding and drunken driving), 35 per cent to the poor state of vehicles, and only 10 per cent to the state of the roads.“If the country had good roads and all the motorists drove well, we would still have a large number of accidents caused by the poor maintenance of vehicles”, he said. The main vehicle problems included poor brakes, bald tyres, unbalanced shock absorbers, and defective lights.Compulsory inspections, Mondlane said, were intended to ensure “that the vehicles on our roads have the basic conditions of roadworthiness”, and could also help train motorists in basic aspects of maintenance. The inspections would also protect citizens buying second hand vehicles, since no second hand vehicle can be sold without undergoing inspection.Such arguments did not convince Renamo, which insisted, against all the evidence, that it is the state of the roads that is the determining factor behind accidents. The Renamo deputies seemed to believe that mobile death traps should be allowed to remain on the roads until every last pothole has been removed.They accused the government of trying to make money from the inspections. But in reality, the inspection has been farmed out to a private company, Control Gold, and no-one has yet shown that this company is controlled by what Renamo is fond of calling “the nomenklatura”. The cost of the inspections would just “make people poorer”, they claimed. “The intention of the government is to take money away from already impoverished citizens”, declared Hilario Waite.In fact, the charge of inspecting a car, including Value Added Tax (VAT), is 702 meticais (about 20 US dollars). Anyone who can afford to buy a car, and pay for fuel, lubricants and spare parts, will hardly find 702 meticais for an annual inspection an impossible burden.As the two day question and answer session with the government drew to a close, so the Renamo speeches became more extreme, until Armindo Milaco compared the ruling Frelimo Party to Satan, and declared that Mozambique has “the most corrupt government in the world”.Milaco claimed that Frelimo was responsible for pretty well every prominent death that has occurred in the past 40 years – including former Information Minister Rafael Maguni (who died in a traffic accident) and former chief of staff of the armed forces, Sebastiao Mabote (who drowned while on a beach holiday).