Mozambique’s main opposition party, the former rebel movement Renamo, on Wednesday tried to prevent the government from amending a paragraph in its economic and social plan for 2011.The addendum, Renamo said, had been submitted irregularly, and so should be struck out. This was a “prior question” which should be solved before even starting the debate on the plan and budget.Irritated deputies of the ruling Frelimo Party regarded this as just another time-wasting manoeuvre by Renamo, and demanded that the debate should begin. Fatally, the parliamentary chairperson, Veronica Macamo, hesitated – which allowed Renamo to string this procedural issue out for an hour. Frelimo demanded an immediate vote on moving to the debate – under the Assembly’s standing orders this demand should take priority over other matters. However, Renamo declared they didn’t want a vote on starting the debate, but a vote on canceling the supposed addendum.The head of the Renamo parliamentary group, Angelina Enoque, threatened that, if Macamo took a vote on starting the debate, the Renamo deputies would all refuse to participate, and would leave the chamber, only returning when the debate was under way.Rather than calling Enoque’s bluff, Macamo declared that “this document does not have the format of an addendum. It’s merely a document that resulted from a discussion between the Assembly’s Plan and Budget Commission (CPO) and the government”.Renamo treated this as a victory and erupted into applause. The Renamo behaviour behaviour reeked of dishonesty, because the deputy who raised the issue, Jose Samo Gudo, is the rapporteur of the Plan and Budget Commission and he had signed the CPOn opinion on the Plan, which contained the supposed addendum. Indeed, Samo Gudo had initialed every page of the opinion.The substantive issue was the definition of poverty. The Economic and Social Plan stated that poverty in 2008/09 was estimated at 54.7 per cent of the total population (the figure found in the latest household survey by the National Statistics Institute). This was a decline of 12.1 percentage points compared with the figure of 69.4 per cent in 1996/97, but the following survey, of 2002/03 found a poverty incidence of 54.1 per cent. This meant that between 2003 and 2009 “there were no statistically significant changes in the level of poverty”.In absolute terms, poverty had increased. “The number of people below the poverty line rose from 9.9 to 11.7 million, due to the growth in population of about three million between 2002/3 and 2008/9”.The government’s “addendum” put before the CPO attempted to elaborate on this, and show exactly what the figures meant. The altered version of the paragraph stated that the poverty figures referred to “the proportion of people who have an average daily income of less than 18 meticais (51 US cents, at current exchange rates), the amount needed to ensure a daily intake of about 2,000 calories”.The government defines this as “food poverty”, and added “this is not a measure of all indicators of poverty since it does not assess access to water, education, health or access to goods such as bicycles and radios”.It blamed “food poverty” on the floods which struck Sofala province in 2008, when the household budget survey was being undertaken, and on the lethal yellowing disease which struck coconut palms, one of the mainstays of the economy of Zambezia province.The dispute erupted again several hours later, when the chairperson of the CPO, Eneas Comiche, tried to read out the CPO opinion. When he reached the poverty paragraph, Renamo interrupted and demanded that it be censored.The addendum had been withdrawn by Macamo, Samo Gudo claimed, and so it should not appear in the CPO opinion, which would have to be rewritten.A second Renamo deputy, Francisco Machambisse, declared “what was withdrawn cannot be known”.This was too much for Macamo – the CPO’s opinion had been written and signed by all of its members, including the three from Renamo. Nobody had the power to tell the CPO to go and rewrite it.Renamo did not push the issue to a vote, and Comiche was allowed to finish reading the opinion.The only conclusion one can draw from this procedural wrangle is that Renamo does not want the public to know that the poverty line is fixed at an income of 18 meticais a day.
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