The governing board of the Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, its Standing Commission. has placed amending the law on the theft of state funds on the agenda for the next plenary session of the Assembly, due to begin on 12 March.The current law dates from 1979 and is regarded as inadequate and out of date. Last year the law was severely criticized by Attorney-General Augusto Paulino because it does not cover certain ways in which assets are stolen from the Mozambican state.Thus the practice of fraudulently registering state-owned buildings in the name of individuals is not covered by the 1979 law. “To punish this type of conduct”, Paulino told he Assembly last year, “we have to resort to other laws which do not deal with the phenomenon appropriately”.Furthermore, it is difficult to punish theft of funds by state officials who do not sign the cheques or have direct access to the money, leading to the unjust situation whereby officials who order theft receive lesser penalties than their subordinates.“Many crimes related with budgetary implementation, or the illicit appropriation of state financial resources, are not practiced merely by those who directly handle the funds”, Paulino points out. “The most that can happen to a high ranking state leader who orders his subordinates to pay his personal expenses out of the state budget, even if this is a large sum, is that he will be sentenced for abuse of his position to a maximum of two years imprisonment and told to repay the money, without even any interest”.The lower ranking official, however, would receive a much longer jail term, “which weakens the principle of the equality of citizens before the law”.In all, there are 24 points on the agenda approved on Tuesday by the Standing Commission. However, this number is likely to rise, as the government or the parliamentary groups submit more proposals.The spokesperson for the Standing Commission, Mateus Katupha, said the other points include electing the ombudsman, and discussing amended electoral legislation. There is still no consensus among the parliamentary groups on key aspects of the legislation, but the search for consensus cannot be extended indefinitely, since new legislation must be put in place in good time ahead of the 2013 municipal elections.The electoral laws were under discussion for about 18 months in the Assembly’s Commission on Public Administration. But in November last year, the Commission’s chairperson. Alfredo Gamito, had to admit that the Commission was deadlocked on a series of key issues.The Assembly plenary then told the leadership of the three parliamentary groups – from the ruling Frelimo Party, the former rebel movement Renamo, and the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) – to put their heads together and come up with consensual positions.This was precisely what was attempted the last time the laws were revised, in 2006. It did not work then, and it is not working now. The leaders of the three groups were sent for a weekend to the tourist resort of Namaacha, on the border with Swaziland, to hammer out a consensual draft – and, quite predictably, they failed.It has, for example, proved quite impossible to find any middle ground between the three radically different proposals for the composition of a new National Elections Commission (CNE). Frelimo wants the CNE to maintain the same structure as in the current law – which is 13 members, five of whom would come from the political parties represented in parliament in proportion to the number of seats they hold, and the other eight selected from a list of names submitted by civil society organisations.But Renamo, flying in the face of all recommendations for a smaller, less politicised CNE, called for a body of 21 members – five from Frelimo, five from Renamo, five from the MDM, three from the extra-parliamentary parties, and just three from civil society. The Renamo proposal is clearly designed to give the opposition a majority on the CNE.The MDM proposal had the virtue of calling for a small CNE, of just seven members. But four of these would be appointed by political parties (one by Frelimo, one by Renamo, one by the MDM and one by the extra-parliamentary parties) and the remaining three by civil society. None of the three parties heeded the calls from local and foreign election observation bodies who recommended that the political parties should be completely removed from the CNE.On areas where no consensus has been reached, a vote must be taken – which Frelimo, with its overwhelming majority (191 out of the 250 seats), will obviously win.
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