The Mozambican government and the country’s Bar Association (OAM) signed an agreement on Thursday under which a building on Vladimir Lenin Avenue in central Maputo is to be used by the OAM as its head office.After signing the agreement, the President of the OAM, Glberto Correia, said he hoped the building, a former residence, could be made ready for the OAM to occupy it before the start of the 2011 judicial year.For the government’s side, the agreement was signed by the Director of Administration and Human Resources in the Finance Ministry, Luis Guambe.Speaking at the ceremony, Justice Minister Benvinda Levy said that handing over these premises was a major step towards solving the problem of lack of offices for the Bar Association.Levy added that permanent headquarters will later be built for the Association. But until that happened, she was sure that the OAM would be able to make good use of the facilities now being handed to it.Correia declared ‘We have solved a problem which should have been solved long ago. The grant of new premises is of utmost importance for achieving the aspirations of the association”.According to Correia, the rent of the premises where the association has operated up until now costs 56,000 meticais (about 1,500 US dollars) a month. He said the OAM will be relieved of this burden as soon as it moves into the new headquarters.Initially, the government had planned to give the OAM the Vila Algarve, a striking colonial building in the centre of the city that had once housed the Mozambican headquarters of the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE.But the building had not been maintained for decades. It had been squatted in, and was gradually decaying into ruins. Restoring it to its former splendour would have been extremely expensive, and the OAM could not afford it.So the Vila Algarve remains a shell, boarded up, and slowly disintegrating, inhabited by nothing but the ghosts of the political prisoners whom the PIDE once tortured there.
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