“ECONOMIC SABOTAGE”

The governor of the western Mozambican province of Tete, Paulo Auade, has discovered five brand new tractors lying idle in an area designated for a future agricultural machine park, when they ought to have been used in the current agricultural campaign.The machine park is in the Nkondezi region, in Moatize district. According to a report in the Beira daily paper “Diario de Mocambique”, the tractors, each with a plough and various other accessories, cost a million meticais (about 30,000 US dollars) each. The tractors were allocated to Nkondezi by the Zambezi Valley Development Agency, which is setting up machine parks across Tete, in order to help increase the production and productivity of peasant farmers.“This is called economic sabotage”, said Auade, as he surveyed the idle tractors. “It’s a crime to leave the machines here doing nothing, when the peasants need these tractors. This is just playing around, and during this governance we shall end this. “.He noted that the tractors had been allocated without any plan as to how they would be used. Nobody knew when they would begin to work.“This shows that the tractors were bought without any prior consultation with the peasants as to what their needs are”, said Auade. The peasants were not asked whether they needed the machines, or whether they had other priorities such as improving access roads, or irrigation.“Because no plan was made, these tractors remain exposed to the elements, without doing any work”, said the governor.Also during his visit to Moatize, Auade was angered to find that the company TIC, a contractor hired to build five classrooms in the Zobue administrative post, had failed to equip them with blackboards. It had also failed to place taps on the tanks used to harvest rain water.
Although TIC had received money for the blackboards, the Moatize District Education Services felt obliged to dip into its own funds to buy them.Auade ordered that TIC be removed from the list of authorized contractors in the province. “This company can never again bid for building jobs”, he said, “since it has shown that it is not serious”.He also accused the district education director, Antonio Sopa, of being “a bad manager”, for failing to hold TIC to the terms of its contract.“The state gave money to the contractor, but you took out more money to buy the black boards”, said Auade. “That’s not how it should be. The contractor must be held responsible for everything in the contract which it failed to do”.