Pemba — Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Wednesday declared that culture can become a powerful means of communication for popular mobilisation against poverty, and for recovering "our self-esteem".

He was speaking in the northern city of Pemba, at the opening of the Second National Festival of Traditional Music and Song, scheduled to last until Sunday.

Guebuza described the festival as "a victory for those who always wanted globalisation, in the cultural sphere, to be a two- way street, a street with stops at which cultures can meet".

The first of these festivals took place in the distant year of 1980. The war of destabilisation that savaged the country in the ensuing 12 years is blamed for the failure to hold the event regularly.

But the Minister of Education and Culture, Aires Aly, has promised that henceforth, such festivals will be held every two years.

Guebuza said that in his visits to the provinces and districts since taking office in February 2005, he had witnessed how cultural activities "help raise the self-confidence of our fellow countrymen in believing that they are able to win the battle we are waging against poverty".

Culture "gives us confidence in victory over the obstacles to our development - namely red tape, the spirit of apathy and drift, corruption and crime, and diseases such as AIDS, malaria and cholera", he added.

Guebuza stressed that Mozambican culture can be "an added value that impels us to pick up the pace so that sooner rather than later we can make poverty history. In our culture we seek the courage, strength and inspiration necessary to meet the challenges of this stage in our development".

Present at the event are artists and groups from all 11 provinces, in what Guebuza described as "an open school where traditional song and music portray our diversity, our values, our achievements and our hopes for a better future. We celebrate this diversity in the conviction of its value and its role ion building a Mozambique that we and future generations should be proud of".

The President stressed that Mozambique is consolidating the peace achieved in 1992, and that some of the participants travelled to Pemba by road - something that would have been unthinkable during the years of war.

People who had travelled across the country would have witnessed how poverty was not specific to any particular part of Mozambique, but was a generalised phenomenon. But they would also have seen how, throughout the country, "Mozambicans are fighting to overcome this evil called poverty through their own efforts", stressed Guebuza.