GOVERNMENT FAILS TO ANSWER QUESTIONS

The parliamentary group of the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) on Thursday accused the government of failing to answer several of the written questions which it had submitted for the two day debate between deputies and ministers in the country’s parliament, the Assembly of the Republic.The MDM had asked what the government was doing to support those families who had lost loved ones to police bullets during the riots in Maputo and the neighbouring city of Matola on 1 and 2 September.When Interior Minister Alberto Mondlane addressed the Assembly, he mentioned the riots but said nothing about any compensation for the families concerned.At this, MDM deputy Jose de Sousa pointed to the case of an 11 year old schoolboy, Elias Muianga, killed by a stray bullet on 1 September. What was the government doing for his family? Even to this very specific question there was no answer.Sousa also noted that the government did not reply to the MDM question “What has failed in government strategy so that poverty levels have worsened in Sofala, Manica and Zambezia provinces, according to the report from the latest Household Budget Survey?”The household survey, undertaken by the National Statistics Institute (INE), showed that poverty, when measured in terms of consumption, had risen slightly between 2003 and 2009 – from 54.1 to 54.7 per cent of the population. This increase took place almost entirely in the three central provinces mentioned by the MDM. In Zambezia, poverty increased from 44.6 to 70.5 per cent, in Sofala from 36.1 to 58 per cent, and in Manica from 43.6 to 55.1 per cent.This contrasted to the sharp decline in poverty in some other provinces (in Inhambane poverty fell from 80.7 to 57.9 per cent, and in Cabo Delgado from 63.2 to 37.4 per cent). It is probably no coincidence that the three provinces with sharp increases in poverty were all badly hit by the Zambezi floods of 2007 and 2008 – but the government made no attempt to explain the figures, and ignored the MDM’s question.Also unanswered was the request for information on tax payments by mega-projects such as the Mozal aluminium smelter, the South African petro-chemical giant Sasol (which operates the natural gas fields in Inhambane), and the companies with coal mining concessions, Vale of Brazil and Riversdale of Australia. Planning and Development Minister Aiuba Cuereneia gave a great deal of data on the scale of investment by the mega-projects, how many jobs they had created, their purchases of local goods and services, and the amount spent on social responsibility projects. But he did not answer the question on tax revenues.The omission is odd, because Mozambique is committed to joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), under which all payments made by oil, gas and mining companies must be made public. This might not cover Mozal, but it would cover all the other companies mentioned by the MDM.