MONEY DISAPPEARS FROM DISTRICT FUND IN INHAMBANE

Over a third of the money disbursed from the District Development Fund (FDD) in the southern Mozambican province of Inhambane between 2007 and 2010 cannot be accounted for, according to a report in Tuesday’s issue of the Maputo daily “Noticias”.The figures come from a report on the performance of the FDD presented last week at an Inhambane Provincial Seminar on Public Finance. Over the period concerned, 300.5 million meticais (10.5 million US dollars at current exchange rates) were disbursed – and 120 million meticais have “disappeared”.The FDD is still commonly referred to as “the seven million”, since it began in 2006 as an allocation of seven million meticais from the central state budget to each of the 128 districts in the country. The money was to be lent to individuals and groups who presented viable projects to improve food security or create jobs. In 2007, the power to handle the funds was decentralized to district level.The head of the Rural Development Promotion Department in Inhambane, Jose Foliche, said the missing sum was calculated on the basis of information from the districts. The districts provided information on how much money had been repaid and how much of the loans was still outstanding.And the accounts do not add up – there is a gap of 120 million meticais. Work is now under way in all the districts, Foliche said, to discover what happened to the money.“This money did not disappear in the Provincial Finance Directorate”, he said, “but in the districts where it was allocated. It is up to the managers in the districts to explain this, so that we know whether the money was delivered to the proponents of approved projects who then made off with it, or whether there are simply mistakes in the accounts”.Up until now, the main problem with the FDD, across the country, has been the low rate of return. Most of those who borrowed money from the fund have not repaid it, or have repaid only small amounts.So the Inhambane Provincial Government decided to draw up an FDD repayment plan, and it was then that it was found that 120 million meticais could not be accounted for.Up to 2010, only 28 million meticais of the FDD loans in Inhambane had been repaid.