Mozambique’s Minister of State Administration, Carmelita Namashalua, on Monday downplayed the conflict between the Zambezia provincial government, and the mayor of Quelimane, the Zambezia provincial capital, Manuel de Araujo.Speaking to reporters, she said that, in the event of a poor working relationship between the provincial and municipal governments, “there are appropriate channels for communicating with the competent bodies and solving the problem”.Namashalua believed that conditions do exist in Quelimane that favour work by the various state bodies concerned.The Minister was clearly referring to claims last week by Araujo that members of the provincial government are undermining his plans for Quelimane’s development. He said “there are people in the provincial government who do not want the project for rehabilitating and expanding the drainage system to be carried out, because Frelimo is no longer in power in Quelimane”.Araujo is a prominent member of the opposition Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM), and he won the by-election for mayor of Quelimane on 7 December with over 63 per cent of the vote.On Friday, Araujo told the Quelimane Municipal Assembly he had discovered that six people who work in the office of Provincial Governor Francisco Itai Meque are receiving their wages from the municipality rather than from the provincial government. Araujo pointed out that this arrangement is illegal.He said he had written to Itai Meque, asking the governor to return to the municipal treasury the money paid illicitly to these six people over the past two years.But Namashalua said that she has received no official information about poor relations between the municipality and the provincial government.“I don’t know anything about this. Nobody has told me anything”, she said. “I am only hearing this information through the media. I cannot make any statement or take any measure about the matter without official information. There exist proper channels to communicate with me if there are any problems”.
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