ASSEMBLY APPROVES GENERAL STATE ACCOUNTS

The Mozambican parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, on Thursday approved the General State Accounts (CGE) for the 2010 financial year, with 162 deputies of the ruling Frelimo Party voting in favour, and 40 deputies from the former rebel movement Renamo and from the Mozambique Democratic Movement (MDM) voting against.The opposition’s main argument for rejecting the CGE was that the country’s supreme audit body, the Administrative Tribunal, had pointed to a number of errors, omissions and failings in the CGE – as it does every year.Frelimo deputy Sabado Malenza retorted that “at no point in its opinion did the tribunal said that the accounts should be rejected. What it did say was that the quality of the 2010 CGE was a great improvement on previous accounts”.Some of the opposition remarks were at the level of insult. Thus Renamo deputy Antonio Timba claimed that the government uses the state budget “as its personal cash machine”. His knowledge of Mozambican realities, however, was more than a little questionable – for example, he claimed that the Mozambican health service was so shoddy that “it requests a great deal of gymnastics to acquire a simple paracetamol”.Finance Minister Manuel Chang told reporters after the vote that speeches such as Timba’s were not to be taken seriously. “It’s just a joke – he’s trying to entertain people”, said Chang.“The Minister of Finance does not sign cheques, much less the President of the Republic”, he added. “It’s the computerized system that pays”.Some of the Renamo accusations were quite impossible, said Chang. Jose Samo Gudo claimed that wages were paid to over 1,000 people in the public administration, who lacked the proper documentation to be admitted into the state apparatus.But without those documents, nobody can get into the state payment system. The computerized state financial management system (e-SISTAFE) “doesn’t allow it”, said Chang.If the people mentioned by Samo Gudo were being paid, the money did not come from the state budget – though he admitted that the money might come from other sources, such as donor funds.As for the irregularities mentioned by the Administrative Tribunal, “the General Inspectorate of Finance is following them up”, said Chang. Indeed, even allegations of misuse of state funds in the press were always investigated.“If necessary, disciplinary and criminal proceedings are initiated”, the Minister. Furthermore, in cases where it had grounds to believe that a financial crime it been committed, the Administrative Tribunal itself can bring cases, and in the past has judged some state financial managers.Chang thought the criticisms made by Jose Manuel de Sousa, spokesperson for the MDM parliamentary group, were much more constructive. Sousa had spoken of the lack of a complete list of state assets, and the failure of the GGE to deal with assets that are written off or revalued. He also noted that the digitalization of state financial information was not yet complete. Change accepted much of this criticism, and said his Ministry is attempting to deal with these shortcomings.